Episode C.038 SELLING AGILE

Introduction
Even though the new quarter doesn't start until Wednesday, we are jumping into it with both feet. BTW - that is also the theme for July - Being Agile. Two quick reasons for this theme now. First is we are in new territory when it comes to the economy, social factors, government action and how it is affecting our ability to run a profitable business. The second is how it matches with our previous emphasis around building a "Lean Organization'. The difference is simple - Agile is a mindset that uses the principles of Lean to succeed in unstable times.
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Show Objectives
I changed the name of today's show from "Selling Access" to "Selling Agile" because this makes more sense. As we covered in the previous show  B.038 ACTION OVER STRUCTURE, being Agile is both an internal and external advantage - and how the small beat the big.

We will cover how to use Agile as a major selling point to win new accounts and expand with current customers.

What You Need to Know
Our customer's expectations have changed. This is both an issue before and now after the pandemic. We have grown accustomed to having everything at our fingertips, immediate gratification. In fact many customers would answer when asked "when do you want it" with "yesterday".

The issue of speed, rapid and collaborative development is a major selling point today, and if you add virtual - a whole new avenue has been opened up for creating a competitive advantage, an uniqueness over the competition.

What Are You Selling?

• Flexibility​
• Responsiveness
• Customization
• Collaboration

​What You Need to Do
​​Selling Agile to Customer's - EPISODE B.037  PROJECT TEAMS ARE THE JIT

• Focus on change: Agile development emphasizes that change in scope is part of creating solutions. Customers should see the value of an approach that allows for change. Too many projects fail because the project delivered the system that was designed, but not the system that was needed;
• Focus on iterative development: Agile development emphasizes that the best way to deal with the complexities of developing solutions, is to work in small steps towards a fairly vague end state rather than trying to nail down all the details from the start. Customers should see the benefit in being able to start as soon as possible, rather than having to wait for massive design documents (which are hard to read anyways);
• Focus on frequent feedback cycles: Agile development emphasizes that for change to be identified, frequent feedback cycles are necessary. In Scrum, this is done through the daily scrum, the sprint review and the retrospective. Customers should welcome this, as it allows them to incorporate changing insights;
• Focus on delivering functionality to achieve value: Agile development emphasizes on delivery of functionality to achieve  value at the end of every iteration or sprint. Instead of having to wait for months, customers will be able to inspect progress periodically. Even better, each sprint can potentially deliver functionality that can be put into production or used to convince higher management or end users that the project is really going somewhere;
• Focus on removing the black box: Agile development emphasizes that the best way to develop solutions, is to put the customer in the room with the people that are actually going to build the system. This allows for the most direct communication and sharing of knowledge as possible. Customers should welcome this as it opens the black box that software development is.

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