This is basically a journey for me to find out the suitable way to handle clients and Mr. Lightbulb hit me on the head. We are trying to find that sweet spot to please clients so that they would have a great time with their project experience. So I will write a series of posts to explain the essence of Radical Client Retrospective.
As we know in Agile/Scrum, there is what we call, retrospective. An Agile Retrospective is a meeting that’s held at the end of an iteration process meaning. This is where the team will reflect on what had happened over the past iterations or simply, the whole project. The reason for having an Agile retrospective is to improve your company’s process. This sounds good but you only think about the team’s perspective. You had left out the client in which is one of the most important components of a project. In that note, this process is tweaked a bit focusing more on with the clients and after a certain degree of information had been gathered, we can translate it to the team and ask about their perspective. That’s why I call it, “Radical Client Retrospective”.
To think about the client, who are they? They are the one who gives life to your business. Without your clients, your business will die. Why, because they are the ones who puts some money into your bank account. Well, some of you might say, just make the client happy and that’s it. Keep in mind that the clients also have different kinds of emotions in which we can take account for. You cannot guess what emotion that the client has. They might be mad, sad, happy, delighted, or even confused.
I’ll give you a scenario, the client asks you a question and you give a shallow answer then ultimately the client just accepts your answer and gone ahead to search for an answer on Stackoverflow or asked Mr. Google. You can’t say that it was a job well done right?
So to do a Radical Client Retrospective, you must first set a parameter of emotions that is suitable for your company. It is good to have many sets of emotions but it will be confusing for you and your client. What I recommend are:
- Happy
- They feel delighted for your response or your work. This is possibly the most common emotion to add in to your retrospective.
- Sad
- This is technically made your client sad. They are not mad about something bad they are sad for different possibilities.
- Mad
- For me, this is the most important emotion. This gives a lot of perspective and solutions for you to build a perfect process for your company.
- Confused
- This is similar to sad. The only difference about being confused is that they didn’t understand anything that you had responded to your client.
You can still add or edit out some emotional parameter to your retrospective and it is definitely up to you. So now you are asking, how will you do this because you might not know where to get these data? You gather data while interacting with your clients. You will know what emotion they emit. Like in client meetings, it is easy to see if your client is mad, they are happy, or they are confused on what you are doing.
To do this in remotely, like on a conference call, emails, or even just a chat, it’ll be very difficult to know. On my next article, I will explain to you on how you will gather data on a remote setting. Since this is just an idea of mine, you can definitely pull off your own way of doing this. If you have something to contribute or share on how to do this your way, give me a tweet or shoot me an email and I will be happy to collaborate.
