Steathholders, Shapeshifters and Sergeants: Working With 'Hard' Clients
Add to calendarStealthholders appear at the final demo and destroy your project without warning. Shapeshifters are different people every time you talk to them. And Sergeants won’t take no for an answer. In this action-packed workshop, we’ll demonstrate and practice ways of managing these challenging, but regrettably common, types of client without sacrificing the principles that make agile projects work.
0-10: Setting the scene. We like to start with a background video introducing the concepts while people are still settling in. Depending on the number of participants, we’ll use check-in or brainstorming to sum up everyone’s objectives. We’ll write up timing information and ‘acceptance criteria’ for the session.
10-30: Stealthholders. We’ll start each of the three sections with a re-enactment of how this client type looks in a project, recruiting a volunteer from the audience if needed. We’ll split the audience into groups of 6-8, facilitate a few minutes’ discussion, then invite them to present any practices they feel would help them to work with a stealthholder. We’ll wrap up with our own suggested practices, using the re-enactment style again.
30-50: Shapeshifters: as for Stealthholders.
50-55: Up to 5-minute Blackberry Break - we’ll go straight through this if it’s not needed.
55-75: Sergeants: as for Stealthholders.
75-90: Wrap up and check vs acceptance criteria. Suggestions for further reading and discussion.
- heuristics to determine when a client may require special attention
- specific, testable actions to be taken when a ‘hard’ client is detected
- inspiration and knowledge that even imperfect circumstances can lead to very successful projects
