In Construction Metaphor: Collaboration over Contracts Steve Berczuk speaks to his recent experiences with a home renovation project and the parallels it has with managing software projects using agile values.

During the past year my wife and I decided to basically gut our 1890s era house, undoing a poor addition that had been done in the 1950s, reconfiguring the existing space and adding a room. During the initial phases things seemed to be moving along. We had plans drawn up by an architect who understood our needs at a high level, and the general contractor made visible progress. It was towards the end of project that things got frustrating. Things weren’t happening as we expected. We fell out of the rhythm of weekly meetings. I felt out of the loop about some things and what started out as a team of Architect, Homeowner and Contractor moving towards a goal started to feel like a circle of blame, where everyone was upset at each other.

I thought about this a bit and realized that what was missing from the building experience was the main thing that makes agile software projects successful: feedback. I would have been happy if I knew at the start of each week what would and would not get done. That we would be making progress, and that the progress would focus on my priorities would have been as good as everything being done on schedule. If we had had daily scrums that would have gone a long way towards keeping the project moving, but that was too much of a culture change introduce!

I concur! If I had been able to meet daily with the foreman of each group (or the whole team) of subcontractors building my house a couple years back things would have gone a lot better. Contractors are just like everybody else and will continue to do what they are doing unless pointed in a different direction. Had there been the daily oversight that scrum brings, I think we could have avoided many delays and misunderstandings about what was to be built.

I was actually quite surprised at how much of building a home is figuring stuff out as you go along. I would not have been as frustrated by this if I was able to apply a couple more agile principles to the tasks.

I echo Steve’s sentiments that agile values like Customer Collaboration over Contract Negotiation as a means to build better houses and share in his consternation that this is such a hard sell at the outset of many software development projects.

See also: Scott’s post of Alastair Cockburn’s agile house renovations