•••  Enabling the Agile Enterprise

I have an interesting paradox I have been listening to in the Agile community. On the one hand the craftsmanship discussions resonate with me. After years of experience, apprenticeship, and study one can develop the art and craft of being a great developer. There were points in my life where I have experienced this – in the 80’s with RPG (laugh if you want to) and in the early-mid 90’s with C++.  I was a craftsman of both languages. Since then I have worked with real craftsman – and have established the craft involved in helping development teams perform above their own expectations.

On the other hand, I hear talk of cross functional teams. How the developers should be involved in all aspects of deciding what the product is, how to run the project, where the market is going, how to best optimize profit in an industry, and how to position and sell the product.

And this is paradox. Some developers believe that there is a craft that takes years to develop to what they do. But they don’t recognize craft in enterprise analysis, project management, product management, market analysis, or sales and marketing. I believe this to be a common form of social bias that intelligent people are particularly prone to. The belief that what one person does is very complicated – but that what other people do is very easy.

I had a meeting once with the CFO, COO, CIO, and head of HR. They were having a debate. Each executive was relatively limited in realizing the complexity of the other’s job. At one point, the CFO was telling the CIO how he should run the support organization. The CFO was coming from a simplistic and limited view. I mentioned to the team I had some ideas about how the business should handle non-performing assets from the recent spate of acquisitions. The CFO asked me what I was doing – that there was no way I understood the complexity of his domain. I smiled and told him that since he was directing the technology team without a clear understanding – I was ready to direct the accounting operations on behalf of the the CIO. Luckily, I had established enough trust that the CFO thought about it and laughed. He realized that what appears simple on the outside is difficult when you get down to brass tacks.

So, while I believe that co-locating teams is important to successful teams – and I believe that we need to generate a shared understanding across everyone involved in the project. I also believe that in many jobs there are fine details that separate the very competent from the capable. There is room for specialization in most jobs in the product development organization. But, when we try to push to far in the direction of the generalizing specialist we get dilution across the board.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 29th, 2010 at 7:48 pm and is filed under Agile, Software Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.