Best practices for customer involvement in Agile development? [closed]

Question

We need to involve our customer development partners in our development process. We're more or less following Agile methodologies. Some customer partners are remote, others closer. We need to minimize travel costs.

Our customers are in health care and tend to be busy, expensive, and hard to schedule.

What practices and technologies have worked to support customer involvement? We're using phone calls, phone conferences and email. We're curious about leveraging wiki techniques and would love to hear what's worked for others.

Answer 1

it doesn't matter whether the customer is in the same cubicle or halfway around the planet, except for communication delays - the critical factor is availability.

a customer that is too busy to answer your emails for several days is going to cause your iteration to be late, or fail

the customer has two critical commitments for agile:

1. available to answer questions in a timely manner
2. not to change their mind/priorities during an iteration

the customer must commit to a reasonable service-level agreement (SLA) on availability, e.g. 1-hour response time, or 24-hour response time, etc., and you will need to adjust all estimates and schedules by the lag factor. If the customer will not commit or does not follow through, cancel the iteration and re-plan, bringing the customer's commitment to the forefront again. Do not just "guess" at what you think the customer might want.

Bottom line: without a customer commitment, agile will not work.