Cooks make tastier food when they see their customers
I came across the above analogy in one of the articles on the research posted by the Harvard Business Review staff. As part of their study they used the below four scenarios at a restaurant:
Neither the cooks nor the patrons were able to see each other.
The patrons were able to see the cooks but cooks were not able to see the patrons.
The cooks were able to see the patrons but the patrons were not able to see the cooks.
Both were able to see each other
It was found that the performance of the cooks increased reasonably in scenario 3 but, it exceeded greatly in scenario 4. Also in scenario 4, the customer satisfaction was very high as compared to all other scenarios.
Well, this gave me something to think about. We discussed this as a team and agreed on making an effort to keep the walls between the developers and customers as transparent as possible.
It's not that it's completely opposite right now. The development models we follow at Giant Leap Systems encourage the need for customer participation but nevertheless, if a conscious effort is made and data recorded, it might just open up the work environment to increase value and quality.
Since then we have been implementing this in incremental steps and it's already proving to be a low-cost strategic advantage.
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