Collaboration over Process

(This is the first in a Daily Thoughts series. I used to blog every day, but during the writing of the Personal Kanban book and creation of the Personal Kanban website, I fell out of practice. This is getting back to true blogging. Fast, unedited, perhaps a little more politically incorrect here and there.)

 

The agile manifesto said "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools".  For years, I did not question that principle.

Now, however, I would replace this with "Collaboration over process."  Here’s why:

What's happened with agile is that the rhetoric is so team empowering that it transforms teams into heroes. Like individual heroes, this divides them from the rest of the org. It turns them into inward focusing groups that are optimized for their own product and have a well constructed but ill-fitting interface into the rest of the organization. While it was team collaborative and was more collaborative with outside stakeholders, the rhetoric still focused on the teams.

But the teams are made up of individuals. And the team operates within an organization. And the team has outside resources. And the team has clients. There’s a lot going on with those outside interactions that need to be explicit.

I really took the Agile manifesto seriously. Like many, it was pinned on my office wall. I could bludgeon uncooperative employees or clients with it. I could wax eloquent about it. For me, finding its shortcomings was a painful and lengthy process. I slowly came to the realization that, as it had aged, Agile had codified, ossified, solidified into something you could easily do wrong and that was nearly impossible to do right. The words in the manifesto no longer represented what was happening in practice.

So, I began to strip away some of the trappings of over-loaded agile at my company. We replaced sprints with release cycles. We destroyed the product owner for a fully collaborative relationship with clients. When we started with kanban, it was game-on. In 2005, when we ran our first kanban driven project, we had a very different view of kanban - but even then visualization of flow almost immediately started to change how we worked.

Our process evolved rapidly during that project. At every standup people had a suggestion of how to make it better. There was a collaborative spirit not just for creating the software, but also for how the project was managed. We were no longer following a rule-book of best practices. We were building something that worked for that particular team building that particular software for that particular client.

In other words, the team had the freedom to truly optimize.

Don’t let anyone say you are doing a process “wrong" – find what your “right” is.

Image by @gavintech and shared by Venessa Miemis

 

 

 
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Comments

[Edward Vielmetti]

Glad to see you back on the blogging treadmill.

[Paul_boos]

Hi Jim,

While I like the distinction you are making. I think the signatories of the Agile Manifesto had the thought that most things between the business and It became contracts (Project Charters, Project Plans, or other documents with rigid scope). Which is why they put Customer Collaboration over Contract Negotiation.

They stressed Interactions over Processes (and tools) to reflect the high bandwidth information sharing needed (over a rigid process that defines how information was to be shared (or a tool that showed how it would be captured). Of course working in collaboration is a form of high bandwidth interaction, so what you propose fits soundly with the intent.

I've always been a proponent of a single product owner (though I am preferring the term Product Growth Facilitator) to coach subject matter experts (SMEs) in the collaboration on the product and to help ensure prioritization occurs. I can see a committee working in some cases, but a single facilitator to the business makes it easier from a coordination aspect. The drawback is when this facilitator tries to be the end-all-be-all SME.

Sounds like you truly embraced the values of the Manifesto; unfortunately many take it out of context and think it mandates a particular process. Glad to see you didn't fall into that trap.

Hope to catch you in DC soon!
Paul