• Agile Leadership

Driving Customer Value: 6 questions for Richard de Rijke

Driving Customer Value. Can’t that just be done in Dutch? Let’s try: driving customer value. In whatever language, it reflects well what you will be working on with Agile specialist Richard’s new training or in-company program. But what do you do if you want to know more in advance about evolutionary change, voting cues and major pitfalls of organizations? Then ask Richard these 6 questions.

Richard, imagine it’s 2014 and this training comes by on your timeline, why had you clicked through immediately?

Great question. I was then just in my transition phase from project and portfolio manager to Agile coaching. After that retraining, I started coaching at the team level and discovered that the biggest problems are not at the team level, but at the organizational level. In practice, you can therefore achieve much more Agile results by looking at the environment of teams and the systems within organizations. In other words, to the bigger picture. Then you also see that by allocating budgets and setting targets from above, you put extra pressure on teams. This often does not make the work any more enjoyable for team members. I think that ten years ago, as a starting Agile Coach, this would have been very useful. The most important side effect of this Driving Customer Value Training is that teams start enjoying their work again and that the ‘why’ is clear again. At Scrum Academy, we sum this up nicely as: High Impact. Happy Teams.

Zooming in on that customer value for a moment. What if you don’t manage that as an organization?

Then you’re probably more organization-driven. I see that often creates one of the biggest pitfalls of organizations: an inside-out focus. First look at yourself, then look at the customer,’ seems to be the vision. But in the end you are mainly optimizing processes and looking at how you can reduce waste. A good thing to do, don’t get me wrong, but you lose sight of the customer! So I would say: turn it around and go for an outside-in focus. Put the needs and wants of the customer first. Make that customer more than just a consumer, because a customer is any group to whom you value and deliver value. So also your employees and shareholders of the organization. Within the Driving Customer Value training we therefore start with questions such as: what are my different customer groups? What customer values do we want to deliver and from which vision? If you want to start working with these types of questions, then this training fits in perfectly.

Clearly, that makes me curious about the next thing: who then does Driving Customer Value not fit perfectly?

With people who don’t want to change at the core of their organization. See, in our training and in our in-company Driving Customer Value program, we use “the Big Picture. That is, we map the entire organization according to our model before zooming in on details and responsibilities with the various teams. We also look to see if there are force fields that limit values for customers. This is the kind of system we are going to work on. Because within some companies, although there is a big bang change, you see people in their new roles just exhibiting old behaviors. So we prefer to do it evolutionarily and change the status quo. The systems that are in an organization cause a certain behavior. That’s why with Driving Customer Value we change those systems first. You have to be open to that as far as I’m concerned.

And suppose you were allowed to apply Driving Customer Value to everything, where does your biggest dream lie?

Pfoe, that’s kind of an interesting question. Something that is always on my list, but seems a bit unrealistic, is how we choose our government and how we vote. This is all solution-oriented, take a good look at the voting guide. There is a problem, then these are the possible solutions you can choose from. But why do we want these solutions and what value do they add? That’s why I once got into value-driven voting in a brainstorming session with my colleague Erik Bras. For this, we chose the topic of migration with the frequently mentioned solution: close borders. I honestly think that 80% do not know the consequences of this solution. After all, a solution is never that simple, it is always about the context and the possible consequences of a solution. In my opinion, it is much better to look at what we all think are important values and collect from the people where therein lies the problem. Only then can we work towards a possible solution.

You mention Erik Bras, your colleague and training partner. Why don’t you teach this training alone, what does Erik bring?

What Erik does very well is watch and listen to a group and the group process. He sees exactly what is happening and based on that he can make adjustments. And that is necessary because we want the group to have had a valuable training or session at the end. About 80% of that value is of course in the training itself, but there is also 20% hidden value that we have to bring out during the training. That’s where Erik’s strength lies. That’s why it’s so nice that we do this training in pairs: one of us gives a piece of training, so the other can put his focus on that interpersonal piece.

Finally, about you: what does delivering this training or in-company program get you?

It makes me genuinely very happy. The way we have structured the training now, we give participants a lot of information on the first day. That can be quite intoxicating for a while, because many insights need time to land. But during the second day we focus the theory more on practice. Then you see things land! That is wonderful to see and gives me satisfaction. In the end, it’s all in the sharing of knowledge. When you hear an experienced Product Owner or Agile Coach say something like ‘wow, we really need to start working on this tomorrow’, then you know that you yourself have really delivered customer value.

Are you missing a question?

Well, for example, this one: “what can readers do who still have a question about Driving Customer Value? For them it is of course good to know that you can always email or call us without any obligation. Then we will calmly discuss your questions one-on-one with each other.