This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz by Laurent Bossavit. Original Post: The absent customer Feed Title: Incipient(thoughts) Feed URL: http://bossavit.com/thoughts/index.rdf Feed Description: You're in a maze of twisty little decisions, all alike. You're in a maze of twisty little decisions, all different. Latest Agile Buzz Posts Latest Agile Buzz Posts by Laurent Bossavit Latest Posts From Incipient(thoughts)

I've recently been talking about customer unresponsiveness with a client of mine, and a perfect example of our persisting wrongheaded attitudes in this respect just crossed my inbox, courtesty of the online mag StickyMinds.

Peter Clark discusses "bread crumbs" - leaving a trail of written traces to document important decisions affecting a project. One of the cases Clark examines is a customer or key stakeholder failing to approve requirements by an agreed date:

The second strategy involves sending a letter to the customer stating that he has missed the previously approved date, and giving him a drop-dead date to approve the specification. Inform him that after that date, you will consider the specification approved by default. Any changes after this date will require a change to the contract, resulting in increased cost and/or schedule delays.

The phrase "approved by default" is making me angry even as I read it for the tenth or twentieh time. Approval - the declaration of customer satisfaction - is an active process, not something you can pretend has happened "by default". If we want to be honest, we'll inform the customer that absent a response by the "drop-dead" date (nice thing to wish on your customers, by the way) we will assume they have withdrawn from the contract.

Clark correctly stresses that the worst possible strategy is to say nothing and forge on with the project. But it's all too likely that in such a situation, we have already failed to monitor and manage customer involvement in previous phases of the project. For instance, did the customer make a reliable promise to sign off on the requirements by the agreed upon date ? Or did we suggest a date, for instance by sending a milestone list, but fail to explicitly reach an agreement on what the customer was to do by then ?

The "approved by default" tactic is just setting up the customer to be blamed for the project's failure. That can't be effective - it will lead to more blaming, this time from the customer, and eventually to sour feelings all around at best, costly litigation at worst. If the relationship is broken, the project can't succeed; better to acknowledge that, and work on repairing the relationship - which can entail severing it altogether.

Pinning the problem on an "absent customer" is also a nice way to avoid facing our own responsibilities in creating the situation.