ProxyCustomer

To avoid both the overhead of maintaining a large requirements docuement, and the risk of mis-communication via one, have your customer on-site with the development team, and highly available to them. Also, to minimise the risk of delivering the wrong thing at the wrong time, and to maximise the customer's confidence in the project, have the customer make the "steering" decisions. Use story cards, written and ordered by the customer, as the primary requirements and planning artefacts

But sometimes the customer cannot be on-site, this is likely to happen with shrink-wrap product (vs. in-house) development, or if some part of a job has been sub-contracted. The customer is remote from the team, and only available for short periods, and only when notice is given.

Therefore:

Have the role of proxy for the customer. The role has two parts: writing stories, making priority judgements. Have someone local and available (preferably not a team member) learn as much as they can about the business, so that they can advise on the content of cards. Also, have someone (not necessarily the same person, but still preferably not a team member) learn enough about the customer's business to advise on the reletative ordering of the cards.

The people filling the proxy customer role are not the customer, though, so it is crucial that they syncronise themselves with the customer whenever possible. Any input recieved directly from the customer will always take precedence over the proxy's view.

In order to avoid the project going off the rails, this synchonisation will take place at least once per iteration. This may involve the use of ProxyCards.

The proxy customer also stands-in for the team when they are reporting back to the real customer. In contrast to a classical team lead, who should always be one of us, be one of the team when talking with the team, and one of "the management" when talking with the management, the proxy customer is always one of them: team when talking with the customer, customer when talking with the team.

We are doing both ProxyCustomer and ProxyCards, I'd be interested to read about other team's experiences with off-site customers. There seems to be the germ of a couple of patterns here. -- KeithB

We have a Project Manager who stays in constant contact with customers. He plays the role of our Proxy Customer, usually. However, his duties are sometimes also split between Useability (sp?) experts and some management folks. We have found this to be eXtremely helpful when an actual customer is not available (i.e. in the afore mentioned cases).³host³³date³May 15, 2001³agent³Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows 2000) Opera 5.11 en?³ProxyCustomer