Agility and Project Leadership

(NOTE: The post below is not really my personal view, more of a sentiment I'm seeing amongst those practicing Scrum, though I agree much with it.)

I really loved the idea of Scrum, really I did!  But I’m starting to realize that in reality, what was supposed to release me from the shackles of the tyranny of my Gantt chart cum waterfall ways is the fact that I’m now feeling the very same burden and overhead for which I wished to escape!

The fact is that Scrum ass-u-me’s that we are good at estimating.  In fact very good, because only then could you finish a working deliverable at the end of each Sprint.  The problem was that we’re not, yet the irony is that by breaking things down into Sprint iterations that were badly estimated, we ended up jerry rigging the estimation for the next Sprint which cause Sprint after Sprint to miss their deliverables.  Rather than get frustrated over a prolonged period of time after a traditional planning process, we would get bursts of frustrations that started making us exhausted.

On exhaustion, while it initially seemed a great idea to have daily stand-up meetings, Sprint planning meetings and all that good stuff, like anything else people show up and are enthusiastic at first, but then as time moves on and the bottlenecks start to occur as described above, you as ScrumMaster will become quite prickly and everyone working around you demoralized or bored.

And for all you “Certified Scrum Coaches”, don’t tell me that “we’re just doing it wrong” as that’s starting to sound trite.  I harbor no grudge against the Scrum framework, but like all good things it must come to an end and someone (maybe me!) will come up with a new twist to an old trick and get us all moving and excited again (Kanban anyone?).

Scrum, it's not you, it's me and hope we can still be friends.

I ran into this article by Andy Hunt on the Pragmatic Bookshelf site, which is one of the well know publishers of Agile software development books.  I particular liked the section with a quote from a software architect during an Agile workshop:

“The theater I did in college has helped me more in my programming career than half of my engineering courses.”—Grant Gainey, Senior Architect Developer

The article goes on to discuss how the improvisational skills learned in Theater are more in line with the kind of agility “Agile” is purportedly advocating.

The bigger issue that was revealed to me is something I have been thinking of for quite some time in that the field of project management, both traditional and Agile and everything in between has suffered from the tyranny of left brain thinking.

This is not surprising since the majority of people who have entered the field of project management are from construction, engineering and IT.  So naturally the focus is still on process and analysis and nothing really much on what makes us do what we do.  I know some of you Agile evangelist will argue that its focus is on people over processes, but I don’t buy that because none of the Agile methods go deeply into the humanistic aspects of why people do what they do and how they do it.

In any event, I have to admit that I have lost interest in the Agile movement and in fact am getting quite bored of it.  That’s not so say that “being agile” is not important!  In fact, I think Agile is not agile enough.

What’s needed is a broader perspective and one where we can learn from other fields.  I’m finding that the field of behavioral economics provides a lot of empirical data that supports inferences on team motivation and dynamics and  the quote above, and I may be biased since my educational background was in philosophy and comparative literature, highlights that we could definitely learn from the arts and humanities.

My writings going forward will focus on this idea of agility that will make Agile more, hmm agile.

Here's a great introductory video from Gemba Academy on Lean 5S:

What I especially like about this video is its emphasis that these practices are important and easy to follow regardless what industry you work in and the type of work you're doing.  But the most interesting part was the section on the origins of Lean 5S from Henry Ford's CANDO idiom:

Whether you work in software development or manufacturing doing Lean, the principles stay the same and as you can see, it doesn't matter where it originated since the practical and useful principles are timeless.

Anyone involved with Agile hears that Scrum is the most popular project management method within the umbrella of Agile practices.  But Jim Coplien (one of the chief founders of the Design Pattern movement) argues that Scrum’s root is really not from Agile, but rather the Toyota Production System (TPS).  I’ve heard him say this in various lectures, but in this interview he states this very directly:

For now I have hope that the TPS ideals, and particularly as they are manifested in Scrum, can show teams how to marry complexity with planning. I think it’s important to point out that agility and TPS often have opposing foci and, further, that Scrum is more about TPS principles than about agile principles. Agile was a software-specific manifesto penned in 2001; Scrum goes back to 1993 or 1994. We can say that agile came from Scrum, very late in the game — not vice-versa. More realistically, they both emerged from a growing realization in the 1990s of the need to support complex system development. Scrum emphasizes the systems thinking components of such changes and I hope those prevail in the intermediate term.

I actually agree with this and had actually written about this in one of my earliest articles for Gantthead.  What do you think?  Do you agree with this assessment or not?