Musings on project management: C-R-A-C-K (as in Agile customer)

Saturday, August 4, 2012

C-R-A-C-K (as in Agile customer)

What's a CRACK Agile customer you might ask?

Dr. Barry Boehm, a noted software methodologist with a long and illustrative career at TRW, DARPA, and USC, and author of the COCOMO model and Sprial methodology, writes about the ideal customer for agile projects. They are:

Collaborative: they will engage with their customer peers and with the development team
Representative: they know the product or system requirements and can represent their constituents accurately
Authorized: they can make the decisions needed to keep velocity up, and their decisions stick!
Committed: they take their job seriously and make every effort to advance project success
Knowledgeable: they can understand what the developers are telling them in the context of the business or market situation

Good grief! Why keep this in the agile space? Doesn't eveyone want a CRACK customer? How could it be otherwise?

If you're curious about the agile/traditional thing, and agile stuff in general, take a look at other Boehm'isms on agile in his book, with Richard Turner, "Balancing Agility and Discipline: a guide for the perplexed", published by Addison-Wesley in 2004. It's got some really good things to offer.