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If nobody does something there is a chance it doesn't work. The most problematic point to me seems to be point 3 'customer collaboration'. Does anybody know how

If nobody does something there is a chance it doesn't work. The most problematic point to me seems to be point 3 'customer collaboration'. Does anybody know how to do that in real life? What does the sales team sell then? And more important how do you prevent feature creep from the customers side wanting more and more things during the process? To me I only see this working if you sell working time instead of a product.

jnwatson 5y ago
The sales team sells what has already been delivered. In my experience, the customer collaboration happens through a proxy called the product manager. It is their job to hold meetings with customers to figure out priorities. You don’t “prevent” feature creep ever. It is part and parcel of development. You can, however, manage it by restricting when the goalposts change. In Scrum, that’s at sprint boundaries. The most important bit is that the customer chooses priority but the developers choose velocity.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  Except most customers only pay when it goes live, or reaches major milestones, and then you are out of budget, struggling to find another parallel project to somehow keep the team in place, before management states it is time to move on.
  - CRConrad 5y ago
    > Except most customers only pay when it goes live, or... But with (real) agile, it went live early on, didn't it?
paavohtl 5y ago
> To me I only see this working if you sell working time instead of a product. This is what we do at the consultancy I work at - billing is simply based on time & materials. We work from our customer's premises (when there isn't a global pandemic) and we have people from the customer integrated into our team, so customer collaboration is constant and continuous. Feature creep doesn't really happen, because all parties know what the budget is and how much our time costs.

jnwatson 5y ago

The sales team sells what has already been delivered. In my experience, the customer collaboration happens through a proxy called the product manager. It is their job to hold meetings with customers to figure out priorities. You don’t “prevent” feature creep ever. It is part and parcel of development. You can, however, manage it by restricting when the goalposts change. In Scrum, that’s at sprint boundaries. The most important bit is that the customer chooses priority but the developers choose velocity.

pjmlp 5y ago
Except most customers only pay when it goes live, or reaches major milestones, and then you are out of budget, struggling to find another parallel project to somehow keep the team in place, before management states it is time to move on.
- CRConrad 5y ago
  > Except most customers only pay when it goes live, or... But with (real) agile, it went live early on, didn't it?

paavohtl 5y ago

> To me I only see this working if you sell working time instead of a product. This is what we do at the consultancy I work at - billing is simply based on time & materials. We work from our customer's premises (when there isn't a global pandemic) and we have people from the customer integrated into our team, so customer collaboration is constant and continuous. Feature creep doesn't really happen, because all parties know what the budget is and how much our time costs.