So Emotional

Michael Aucoin, D. Engr., PE, PMP is president of Leading Edge Management, LLC in College Station, Texas and author of Right-Brain Project Management: A Complementary Approach. He can be reached at [email protected].

  Agile   Knowledge Management   Lessons Learned  

It’s right there in the Agile Manifesto: “Build projects around motivated individuals.” In project management, we are schooled in the belief that we start with a project and then we assign tasks to individuals. But the order given in the Manifesto is the better approach--attend first to motivation in people, then organize the project around them. Or as Gandhi said, “Find purpose and the means will follow.”

To find the source of motivation for your agile project, let us ask the most important question: How do you feel about your project? When we feel deep positive emotions about the project, we can tap into a rich source of energy and creativity. In my book Right-Brain Project Management, I studied a number of projects that performed phenomenally well, often with “amateurs” in charge of the projects. Each of these projects had a compelling purpose--an objective that was so critically important that project teams were driven to achieve, often against overwhelming odds. Such an objective is much more than a set of cold specifications or requirements. Of course we need those, but people need something much more--something visceral. When we leverage emotion, we access the deep reservoir of motivation necessary for the challenges of the agile project.

The left-brain approach to motivation is optimizing a transaction. An individual …

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