This is a follow up to my post on getting your clients involved in your projects. I am going to tell a quick story about customer relations gone wrong and respond to a reader comment about the whole idea being nothing more than a nice theory.

When things go very wrong

Last week my wife came to me and asked, “do you remember that article you wrote about customer’s being idiots?”

She proceeded to tell me that she had just heard that her brother had just been laid of because the company is going under.

Now my brother-in-law make kitchen cabinets for a living and he is very good at what he does. In fact, many of the kitchens he installs are worth more than my house!

Now this whole problem stems from one customer that flipped out and threw a tantrum. Now the company was installing the cabinets as the man had requested except there was an issue with the type of wood he wanted and the finish he wanted. This finsih will crack when the wood ages. So the boss went to the client to talk about the issue, explaining carefully why the customer was wrong and provided a solution.

I am not sure the reason for the blow up, maybe the client was one of those guys that can never except that they could be wrong, but a tantrum ensued and the client fired the campany and refused to pay his $40,000 bill for the work that had been completed.

So that was it, the company could afford to start any new projects because it now owed $40K for materials that were already used.

Luckily the customer consulted a designer who also told him he was wrong so he rehired my brother-in-law’s company and handed over a nice big check.

It’s more than a theory. It’s agile.

Even, though the story went bad it did turn out alright in the end. I know this is not always the case. To prove my “theory”, imagine if the client was not shown the kitchen until it was complete. He would have been far more angry to learn that different wood and finish had been used. Even though he reacted poorly initially the problem was able to be resolved early on and the customer was kept happy.

It is the same with software. You know that the client won’t give you all the details correctly, they jut won’t. So it is important to have them involved to keep the project on focus and clear up issues that are bound to arise.

Now this is not my idea to being with. It has been around for a long time and is called Agile Software Development. Agile Software Development refers to a group of software development methodologies that promotes development iterations, open collaboration, and process adaptability throughout the life-cycle of the project.

Now I am not going to convince you of this methodology’s worth. You can decide for yourself. Personally, I have been involved in enterprise level development for almost 4 years now and can tell that since switching to Agile style develoment and following the principles of Domain Driven Design that I have been more productive and produce far been software. Check it out for yourself.