Value Creation is a Dialog

Day two of trying to live the first principle of the 12 principles of the Agile Manifesto (“Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.”). So far so good. I spent much of the day co-training a class. It was a unique training because we asked the attendees to pick the topics that were most valuable to them, prioritize them, then taught the material. Finally we finished up with periodic retrospectives throughout the day. It seemed fairly obvious that this was a great example of asking the customer what they value, delivering the value, then checking to see if they thought it was really useful. After an entire rather exhausting day of this, it occurs to me that continuously providing value is actually a dialog (or perhaps an ongoing experiment) that works like this

1. Ask what value you can provide

2. Attempt to provide that value

3. Ask the customer if they got the expected value

4. Adjust and repeat

I think that value cycle lies at the heart of a lot of Agile processes. You see this in the sprint reviews and retrospectives on projects. It really is the PDCA cycle all over again. But speaking for myself, I think I’m going to have to modify my approach this week. Here’s a sample:

1. Ask friend: How can I provide value

2. Friend: Buy me a beer

3. Beer provided

4. Ask friend: So, how’s that beer?

5. Friend: Excellent! Too warm! Too foamy! bitter, etc.

Value delivered.

#pdcacycle #continuousdelivery #12Principles #firstprinciple #value #dialog #AgiileManifesto #Scrum