At some point, I began to realize that the way we practiced agile centered on how we could keep the development team happy. But they weren’t happy. And neither were the project managers.

Why wasn’t anyone happy?

Worse, our clients were not getting the attention to which they were accustomed and deserved.

Do you think this falls out of agile practices in general or just the way that TDS was doing agile?

I told the staff that our success didn’t happen by chance. Before this past year, we’d put our clients first. Today, I stood firm: from here on out, we stand second to our clients.

Hmm. What do you mean here? Are you saying that agile practices don’t put the clients first?

If the dev team was already doing work for client A when you asked them to switch gears to help client B, are they still not putting the clients first? In this case, they would be putting client A’s needs over client B’s needs because they’ve already invested some time in satisfying client A’s needs and an interruption would damage their productivity for client A.

But it’s really a question of priorities at that point. And developers don’t set the priorities, the project manager does. So, if you determine that client B’s immediate needs are more important than client A’s maybe not-so-immediate needs, then just tell them that. That’s your job. :-)