Postmodernist product development: Scrum is The Andy Warhol of project management
Is software delivery really an art form? What do postmodernism, as exemplified by Andy Warhol’s pop art, and Scrum have in common?
The Manifesto for Agile Software development was written in 2001. Since then, it has gained traction, and its incidence has both inspired and coincided with key changes in the way organisations seek to develop their products through frameworks such as Scrum.
There are many similarities between the divergence of modernist and postmodernist literature and art, and that of “traditional” and “Agile” project management. Each is a reaction to, and can only be understood in the context of, what has come before it.
The Author is Dead: User stories deconstructed
In 1967 Barthes wrote a ground-breaking work, proclaiming The Death of The Author. This was a call to renounce the need to try and understand what the creator’s intent for a piece of art was, instead arguing that meaning is created by the interpreter of the work. In software delivery, where previously a marketing or sales manager might have made unilateral decisions about what exactly the customer wants or what the product means, through Agile principles, there has grown a greater focus on involving users much earlier in the process.
User experience, design thinking methods and co-creation means that features are defined by those using them, based on their own needs and experience with the product. There has been a democratisation of both product feature definition and product development.
In waterfall, the project’s output could only be understood as a whole, through a big bang release of a major delivery. Contrarily in Scrum, the goal is to deliver small increments of value often. The work is fragmented into pieces, with each individual on the development team lending their own inputs to the overall work. User stories*, or Product Backlog Items, are a way of deconstructing the meta-narrative.
*Side note: user stories are not officially part of Scrum, but are commonly associated with it.
One plan to rule them all vs Inspect and Adapt
Andy Warhol, a key figure in Postmodernism, was an expert in iteration. He rapidly repeated the same works in various different ways, experimenting with different colours and processes, particularly screen printing to make repetition easier. Examples of this are his prints of Marilyn Monroe, and the Campbell’s Soup Cans. He also famously used assistants to create parts of his works, rather than being the one sole artistic ‘owner’.
In the same way, rather than projects owned by the Project manager — Scrum democratises planning by putting control and transparency into the hands of the people, through a shared Backlog, Sprint Planning and visible WIP.
Warhol once wrote “When you do something exactly wrong, you always turn up something.” You could say that he inspected and adapted, quickly discarding what didn’t work, and honing in on what did — pretty successfully. Per the Scrum Guide, “A Scrum Team is expected to adapt the moment it learns anything new through inspection” and a popular catch-cry in Agile circles is to “fail fast”. This flies in the face of the single, unflinching master plan that was popularised by waterfall Gantt charts.
Everybody has 15 minutes of fame: the Daily Scrum
Postmodernism reacted to Modernism by democratising art and amplifying the voices of the common people. A well-known concept associated with the period is that “everyone will be famous for 15 minutes”. Rather than one authoritative voice or the select ‘worthy elite’, it was recognised that everyone could have a turn in the limelight. It’s a fun parallel with the Daily Scrum wherein rather than one single authoritative voice (Project Manager/Sponsor) doing all of the talking, Scrum looks to broaden the ownership and hear from the wider hands-on team.
To take that analogy further, in waterfall there was a very definite hierarchy, with the Project Manager at the helm, conducting the orchestra. To put it a different way, they were the “one neck to strangle” when the project ran into trouble. Conversely, the Scrum Guide tells us that their delivery team is “self managing” and that “Within a Scrum Team, there are no sub-teams or hierarchies.” Everyone contributes and the team succeeds or fails together.
What comes after?
If Waterfall is the Modernist approach to Project Management, and Scrum is the Postmodernist, Agile-flavoured response, what then comes after? Some say that it’s Metamodernism: knowing both and moving beyond them.
Andy Warhol is quoted as saying: “Making money is art, and working is art and good business is the best art.” Like anything, we learn by doing, and our business of technology delivery means that we will continue to work at it. We will never stop “uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it.”
Delivery frameworks will continue to evolve as we continue to iterate. Rather than rigidly following one framework, let’s take the best parts of what we’ve learned and evolve them.
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