Mechanical Agile

I came across a fantastic article titled ‘Five Symptoms of Mechanical Agile’ last week, written by Daryl Kulak of Pillar Technology.

In it, he tells 5 stories of Agile teams going from performing well to performing terribly by trying to do “better” in response to external forces.

I recommend you read the whole thing.

At the end of the article, Daryl offers a few recommendations:

• If You See a Best Practice By the Side of the Road – Kill It
• Close the Gap Between Decision-Making and the Work
• Break Down the Boundaries Between Teams
• Value the Unstructured
• Avoid Over-Engineering Your Processes

What jumped out at me is that all the bad things that happened could have been avoided if the senior management teams in the situations had internalized one simple value from the Agile Manifesto: “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools”

As Daryl put it,
“These are the problems that keep your Agile teams from scaling up and sustaining. And they all relate back to treating people like machines instead of like people.

To solve the Mechanical Agile, no amount of new practices or Lean, Kanban or Six Sigma will help you. Scrum of Scrums won’t really help you. More meetings won’t help you. Only addressing the attitude of thinking of people as machines will help you.”

It is this same wrong attitude that lies at the heard for the misuse of metrics, as I discuss in my post ‘Metrics Gone Bad’.

In fact, to truly build a great company, you have to go one step further. Not only do you need to treat your people like people and not machines to be programmed and manipulated, but you need to treat them as assets.

After all, as someone very wise once wrote (I can’t now remember exactly who), a good manager is only right 50% of the time, and knows it. His or her people, the assets, are right the other 50% of the time. Together they work to build a great business.

If the manager is arrogant, derives his or her expertise from lots of books, best practices, and management classes, and his or her power from manipulation and over use of process and metrics, that manager turns his or her people into what they’re being treated as: machines, and not very valuable ones at that.

Now, I’m not saying don’t read management books or don’t utilize best practices. After all, one of the ways OpenView Venture Partners helps the expansion stage software companies in its venture capital portfolio is by doing just that.

What I am saying is: viewing your people as valuable assets comes first, the other stuff comes second. And when the other stuff goes against the first part, forget about it!