Gus Power has an interesting quote about the agility of a team,
“Agility of a team is inversely proportional to the number of external people involved.”
If this is true, and I think it is, how do you convince the team to start making decisions for themselves and stop relying so heavily on the external players. Is there such a thing as an “Agile Revolution?” Lots of times team members are afraid to stand up and make decisions on their own. Why is this? I say in the words of a very wise man,
“Get up, stand up: stand up for your rights!”
You and your team will be better off making decisions for yourselves. And don’t forget, it is always easier to ask forgiveness than it is to ask for permission.
I buy this. It would be foolish to not require a client or customer or other stakeholder to be a part of the team but outside of that the team should make all the decisions and make them rapidly. Do something, assess it’s effectiveness, and adjust.
Agreed see XP value Courage.
We have an undefined term that I find problematic: “external people”. Take Linux. Who is an “external person” in that community? Linux has a huge number of people who are affected by the decisions of apparently a small number of people. Huge. Number. Of. People. So therefore I feel this axiom is essentially wrong. If you examine the development process of the Linux community you will find that it isn’t really XP or even classically Agile (I can’t believe I just used the term “classically Agile”, will you guys ever forgive me?), but it quite obviously a raging success. I think this needs more thought.
I agree with the point that the development of Linux isn’t “Classically Agile.” And I am not making the argument that using an open source distributed development model can’t be successful, it obviously can be, and is. I am proposing that for the “Classically Agile” team, you need to have “Courage” to make more decisions closer to the code base. If that means developers making decisions without managements approval, so be it. The more decisions made closer to the code base, the more agile. I mean let’s face it, that is the whole reason for “On-site Customer,” right. Well if the customer can’t/isn’t on-site, raise some ruckus. Start making decisions on your own and show the customer the right way to do it. And frankly, if you are doing Agile even partly correct, the worst that can happen is a bad decision puts you out one iteration. If you dial your iterations down to one week, that is a drop in the bucket for many large companies. And yes it does need more thought, just like everything else that I say before thinking.
PS: Nice to see the Colonel on Refactr.
I was told about your site from Justin Grammens. Nice to see you guys fighting the good fight, so to speak. So if I get you, what you’re saying is more along the lines of “Agility of a team is inversely proportional to the number of external people who are involved and also clueless.” Like say I’m the customer of your system under development which will replatform my entire business, yet I’m so busy I can’t afford to talk to you because, after all, you guys are just supposed to just “do it right” and if it’s wrong, you will have hell to pay. Somewhere along the line maybe hell does get paid and the project fails. On an Agile project, this is a huge success because it happened very early, before $millions are wasted on building the wrong thing. Sound familliar?