When we talk about the definition of DONE, the agile community almost completely (wow! 🙂 ) agree on the fact that it should be as broad as possible. People are different and what is DONE for you (say having written code and built with no errors) can be different from what is for me (say the code has been shipped and the user is actually using it).
This concept is true for different businesses too.

Rework and delays are killers for delivery and trust. How many time have you found that what you though it was DONE, it was “DONE in the sense that I’ve finished but that and that has to be DONE before the user can have it”?

So the idea is to put everything you can, every step, in the definition of DONE and extend it deeply toward your users.

But sometimes this is not enough: as MktgMeetsIt writes in a comment to my post The Spiral of Distrust:

“there is an emotional component here”

The Dev Team and the Users may have different expectations on that ‘DONE stuff’:

  • For the Dev Team it’s surely the result of their work, for the Users it’s the beginning of a new working experience.
  • For the Dev Team it might have been very tough from a tech point of view, while for the Users it might be a minor change.
  • The Dev Team is willing to get feedback and learn, while the Users might want to be left alone to understand and speed up their processes.

So this last emotional phase probably should be faced in some way and treated as part of the process to gain maximum benefit.

What’s your thought?

PierG