Our stories? Their stories?

Working with customers as an agile consultant in these days, I found that using agile software development practices to manage this consulting project works very well. By turning training, coaching and implementation works into stories and plan with customers, utilizing various best practices such as standup, retrospective etc. that we have been always doing in our software projects, we have made our work transparent to the customers and our planning very adaptable and responsive. A group of customers from different projects are a part of our project team. They acts as customers and project team members as well.

One issue that I found recently is about some coaching and implementation stories. For those kinds of job we have to work with our customer people for a period of time, and they usually have their own daily job to do. Our customers have already used stories to represent the requirement so they have their stories to finish. At the beginning I felt that we are interrupt their working and sometimes they do not have time to work with us on our coaching or implementation stories. We are like sort of external forces not belonging to their projects. I am not saying our customers are unlike to work with us, on the contrary they are very willing to work with us. The problem is just that we were not involved into their projects though we have involved our customers into our consulting project.

Things started going well after we turn our stories into their stories.  For everything we have to work with them, we try to create a story in their project and the people who are assigned to that story will have dedicated time to work with us, which also improved communication between us and customers.

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