In response to http://whitewaterprojects.com/2010/06/04/who-is-your-cutomer/.
I respectfully disagree with the concept of a "technical customer" in addition to a "business customer." It may just be a semantics thing but I think it's important to keep the customer's place special.
The customer is the customer. For the team closest to the customer, that is not difficult to see. For teams "behind" the teams on the "surface" of an organization, it gets a little cloudier. I think it makes more sense to think of the intervening teams between yours and the customer as downstream work-cells. As such, they have the power to specify what an upstream work-cell builds in the moment.
The mental difference, however, is that they are not considered customers when your organization is working to optimize the whole.
Now, if there are two kinds of customer, I would say that there is a business customer and a process customer. That is, you can spend time delivering value to your actual customers, or you can spend time increasing your organizations capacity or lowering its cost.
The process customer is going to be interested in any project that eliminates waste. This might be traditional process projects like training in the latest methodology. This might be the acquisition of a tool. This might be something we don't think of as process but that plays heavily into it, like refactoring or covering legacy code it tests.
The business customer just wants what it wants.
