I recently read the following article by Kevin Brady on Agile/Scrum does not get to grips with human psychology. The core theme of this article was that Agile forgets the human factor, specifically
- People will always put their own interests ahead of the interests of the group.
- People are self-interested
- Commercial production decisions are based on rational expectations.
- Karl Popper’s “First law of collective action”. You can never get more than 5 people to agree on anything.
The core theme of this article was that Agile forgets the human factor, specifically
- People will always put their own interests ahead of the interests of the group.
- People are self-interested
- Commercial production decisions are based on rational expectations.
- Karl Popper’s “First law of collective action”. You can never get more than 5 people to agree on anything.
The discussion then proceeds to highlight some examples of why Agile projects may fail, namely
- The Project Managers /SCRUM MASTERs turned themselves into Project Administrators.
- The project teams had in almost all cases been taken over by strong personalities leading to mini dictatorships.
- Knowledge Monopolies.
- Resource Management had vanished.
- Having had a taste of freedom the dictators were a hateful and aggressive bunch when asked about their managers /SCRUM MASTERS
- Most of the talented young development staff were leaving
- Each of these organisations had differing development approaches and tools from project to project.
- Clients fed up with never-ending, continuous involvement in IT projects
When working on Agile projects I have definitely come across some of these issues, however I think these could also affect projects being delivered under other project methodologies as well. The Burgen Blog addresses similar issues in a direct and humorous way. (You will have to go to Tuesday the 19th June 2007 as the title is unfortunately named so I cannot enter the URL for it).
My take on this is that no project methodology, Agile or Waterfall, counters all these issues through the application of the process. I believe that many of these issues result from a failure in human to human communication and a misunderstanding of the SCRUM planning process. However I strongly believe that Agile projects is more akin to human nature/psychology than Waterfall development because Agile favours individuals and interactions over processes and tools and this is defined at the very heart of Agile in the Agile Manifesto.
As a useful exercise for myself and in a the hope that someone out there may find this useful I thought I would address the arguments above in a series of Blogs to illustrate how I would deal with these issues (or would have liked to deal with them in hindsight). These breakdown into two main topics that I believe are crucial to being an effective Scrum Master:
Facilitating: Encouraging assertiveness to resolve conflict which I intend to address the following items
- People will always put their own interests ahead of the interests of the group.
- People are self-interested
- Karl Popper’s “First law of collective action”. You can never get more than 5 people to agree on anything.
- The Project Managers /SCRUM MASTERs turned themselves into Project Administrators.
- The project teams had in almost all cases been taken over by strong personalities leading to mini dictatorships.
- Knowledge Monopolies.
- Most of the talented young development staff were leaving
- Clients fed up with never-ending, continuous involvement in IT projects
"The plan is useless; it's the planning that's important." where I intend to argue the case that Agile does deal with the following effectively.
- Commercial production decisions are based on rational expectations.
- Resource Management had vanished.
- Each of these organisations had differing development approaches and tools from project to project.
Finally I may decide to demonstrate how I think Agile and particularly Scrum is a very human process by comparing it to the psychological model called the Process of Change (if I can find a reference to this on the internet).