Where has the customer gone in large scale enterprise agile frameworks? Customer Collaboration is one of the main tenants of the Agile Manifesto, but it seems that have we lost touch with this concept as we have scaled agile into large organizations. If we look at the SAFe Big Picture, the customer is represented, but only at the end of the process consuming the solution. This talk explores how and why it is important to pull the customer to the beginning and middle of the process and not just the end. This isn't to pick on SAFe -- the customer doesn't appear at all on the graphics for Disciplined Agile, LeSS, and Nexus at all! The concepts and principles explored in this presentation are universal in any large enterprise and can, and should, be applied to to any framework.
Each of the main enterprise agile frameworks today (Disciplined Agile, SAFe, LeSS, Nexus, etc) have a graphic representation of their model, which present an inside-out view of how an enterprise is organized to delivery in an agile fashion. But what do our agile enterprises look like from the outside, from our customers' view point? As agile becomes widely adopted as the way of developing products, there is a growing gap with where new product development ideas are generated and how customer input is integrated into the agile process. Increasingly we are seeing organizations struggling because of a lack of an effective and experienced product management group and even experienced agile coaches not knowing how to effectively engage customers in their process.

By day I'm an Agile Coaching and trainer, but in my volunteer time I'm an EMT and run a Search and Rescue Squad. Very differnt worlds, but they both involve getting large numbers of people to work together in teams in rapidly changing situations, with limited information, in a high stakes environment.

This talk shows how I used my knowledge as an Agile Coach and ScrumMaster in a situation well beyond IT. We will talk about how Agile/Scrum concepts like breaking work down into smaller increments, using self-organizing team, frequent planning, and retrospectives all are being used in the emergency services field. We also explore how agile principles are incorporated into the cultural aspects of volunteer emergency services -- often thought of as hierarchical and command-and-control, there is actually a culture of of self-organization, decentralized decision making, outcome-based focus, andholding each other accountable -- and it illustrates the underlying cultural principles that are the heart of agile which holds teams together and form high-performing teams that apply in product and software development teams as well.

This fun and fast paced talk walks the participants how a high-urgency search for a missing child is run using agile principles and relates each practice back to a similar approach in Agile/Scrum in the product development world.