Collage of Thoughts - VI

"Being abstract is something profoundly different from being vague … " - Dijkstra

Same goes with "Agile" - regardless of how heavy your pitch is; if you are clueless and directionless, no methodology can save you.

Here are a few tell-tale signs of a very anti-agile structure and culture prevalent in most enterprises obsessed with "agile" -

- Fat layers of management/key decision makers who neither understand how softwares are built, nor how they work. Higher the ignorance, more the need to "control" that which you do not understand.

- Presence of legacy systems with ownerships spread across heavy departments/units; and ceremonious meetings to negotiate integration contracts.

- Dozens of connections/dependencies pointing to one person - the dreaded "God Class" that knows and does too much.

- A constant tension between productive work v/s overheads demanded by management. Reminds me of Kipling's words - "She sends 'em abroad on her own affairs, From the second she opens her eyes— One million Hows, two million Wheres, And seven million Whys!"

Agile is about a bunch of smart builders coming together in "self-organizing teams" - you are either smart at domain or, tech. There are no dimwits to be "managed". It's more of a choreography than an orchestra.

#antipatterns #antiagile

Let "teams" not be a sheer brute force of numbers. May they feed and nourish each other, and reinforce each other's faith in "team-work".

One dozen piggyback'ing on one individual is not "team-work". An individual's potential sacrificed in the name of the greater good of the team or the organization is not "team-work". Dumping all real work and risk onto one individual, while keeping yourself busy with routine or fancy work is not "team-work".

Ayn Rand beautifully portrays the horrors of the "one in all, and all in one" collective society of "equals" - where the quick-minded child with scholarly ambitions, who understood even before the teacher had spoken, is ultimately "chosen" for the vocation of a street-sweeper; as penalty for transgressing and rising above his fellow-brothers in having a "preference".

"He was enslaved by his birth, by his kin, by his race. But he broke their chains. .. But then he gave up all he had won, and fell lower than his savage beginning. .. What brought it to pass? What disaster took their reason away from men?.. The worship of the word "We.""

#Leadership #Team #Nourishment

It's a sad myth that managers "manage" dev projects/teams. Your dev leads are the real ones doing the bulk of the project management, in their carefree, by-the-way style - without making an ostentatious show out of it. That's "white-box" project management - they are not just blindly tracking an opaque task list prepared by the team. And that's in addition to their technical job - individual contribution, tech leadership/guidance and, of course, tech representation in all stakeholder meetings. Everything about planning as well - from scope evaluation, work breakdown, estimates, the right parallelism, the right scheduling, the right skills/people-needs - is done and can only be done by an SME, not a manager.

Before beefing up your management layer while ignoring the bandwidth demands of your technology leadership, do assess whether that need is so real after all (the need should be external-focused). Too much of excess bandwidth at a layer that has no subject matter understanding, and no individual contribution to make (layman review and interference doesn't count as individual contribution - though Trump meddling with scientists is the unfortunate world we live in!), can cost an overloaded team tons of productive hours in fancy meetings and asks, and fancy action items as takeaways from such meetings.

As a pure-play manager; if you sincerely wish to contribute to the team's success, and not otherwise - practice and learn to step out of their way; and realize that it's incredibly taxing to answer all your layman questions; shield the team from all kinds of man-made complications and drama; and strictly refrain from "using" the team to fill up your excess bandwidth. If you feel empty without meetings, find yourself a like-minded counterpart and do yourselves the mutual favor of filling up each other's calendars.

#management #myth

[Re-posted from my recently authored posts on LinkedIn]