Week 1: Customer satisfaction through early and continuous delivery of value
Most change programmes in the wool and mohair chain fail in the same way. A plan is announced at the start of the season, a large document circulates, and the first tangible result is expected somewhere after the next clip. By the time anything visible arrives, the drought has broken or deepened, the exchange rate has moved, two shearing contractors have changed, and the workforce has quietly concluded that nothing was ever going to happen.
Why this principle matters here
The first Agile principle inverts this. It asks you to satisfy the people who depend on the change early and continuously, rather than completely and eventually. The unit of progress is not the plan; it is the delivered result that somebody can see, touch, or bank.
In our industry the word “customer” needs unpacking, because the value chain has many of them layered on top of one another. The exporter and the overseas mill are customers. The broker is a customer. But so is the wool classer who needs a working table, the shearing team who needs a shed that flows, and the farm manager who needs a record system that does not consume an evening. A change initiative that satisfies the mill but exhausts the shed has not delivered value; it has moved cost.
The principle unpacked
Psychologically, the case for early delivery is strong. Bandura’s (1997) work on self-efficacy shows that the most reliable source of belief in one’s capability is mastery experience — having actually done the thing successfully, at any scale. Kotter (2012) makes the same argument organisationally through short-term wins: visible, unambiguous, early results starve the sceptics of ammunition and give the willing something to point at.
The opposite is equally well documented. Long gaps between announcement and result produce what change researchers call change cynicism — a learned expectation that initiatives are talk. Cynicism is expensive because it is rational. If the last four programmes produced nothing, disengaging is the sensible response. You do not argue people out of it. You deliver them out of it.
From principle to practice
- Write down the change you are trying to make in one sentence. If it takes two, it is two changes.
- Ask: what is the smallest piece of this that somebody could actually use within fourteen days?
- Name the person who will use it. Not a department — a person, by name.
- Agree how that person will tell you whether it helped. One measure, collected by them, not by you.
- Deliver it. Then, and only then, scope the next fourteen days.
Common traps
- Confusing a communication with a delivery. A WhatsApp broadcast announcing the new classing standard is not the standard being used.
- Choosing the easiest slice rather than the most valuable one. Early does not mean trivial.
- Delivering value to the buyer at the shed’s expense and calling it progress.
- Letting the fourteen-day slice quietly become a ninety-day slice because ‘we may as well do it properly’.
Reflection
- Which current initiative on your farm, depot, or in your team has been running longest without producing anything a worker could point at?
- Who is the real customer of that initiative — and when did you last ask them what would count as value?
- What could you deliver before your next shearing that would take under two weeks?
- Bandura, A. (1997). Self-efficacy: The exercise of control. W. H. Freeman.
- Beck, K., Beedle, M., van Bennekum, A., Cockburn, A., Cunningham, W., Fowler, M., … Thomas, D. (2001). Manifesto for agile software development. Agile Alliance.
- Kotter, J. P. (2012). Leading change. Harvard Business Review Press.