The Agile Organization — The Story So Far
The agile approach to product development has become the dominant paradigm…and not only in software engineering.
Tracing the lineage of any idea is tricky (did Marconi invent radio or ‘merely’ collect inventions of others into a viable solution?), but it can be useful to know where we are coming from.
My starting point for the agile organization would be the publication of In Search of Excellence by Peters and Waterman in 1982 — a multi-million bestseller. The book had a massive impact on the business world — all of a sudden management was hot! So we’ve had 40-odd years of research, publications and business gurus.
Economic Darwinism on steroids?
In Search, Peters and Waterman discuss what they describe as the ‘skunk works’ they found at a major corporation. The skunk works was a small team of individuals working outside the normal corporate structure to create new products in a hurry. The authors describe the skunk works as a group of between eight to ten people located away from the corporate headquarters — a high performance team delivering new product in a fraction of the time usually taken. Sound like a pretty good definition of an agile team? Yep…this was 1982.
Chris Martlew’s new book, Changing the Mind of the Organization — Building Agile Teams, is available at amazon.co.uk, amazon.com, bol.com and other good bookstores worldwide.
In Fred Brooks’ legendary (at least in the IT business) collection of essays on software engineering, The Mythical Man-Month, he expounds the virtues of the small team as the fundamental building block in software development.
Brooks compares the development team to a surgical team comprising different disciplines but all focused on the same goal. (The book was first published in 1975 — arguably it’s taken a while to catch on. The only explanation I can offer for the IT industry’s organizational inertia is that we have been collectively preoccupied with the breathtaking advances in technology which were hard enough to keep up with.)
An agile approach is being increasingly applied in software development; the most popular form being Scrum. Scrum was developed by Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber.
They borrowed the rugby reference from an article written in 1986 by Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka in the Harvard Business Review. This article compared high-performance teams to the game of rugby union. In rugby the team aspires to move the ball towards the goal-line as a unit, passing the ball rapidly among the players.
Each of the above themes brought a number of models (some may claim panaceas — which is nonsense) to address the problems of the times and provide the ever-elusive sustainable competitive advantage.
All the ideas are relevant to some extent in our modern business context. Some of the concepts worked well, some less well, but they provided people with reference points to frame their thinking on moving their organizations forward.
The danger with all models is to follow them too rigidly (even religiously) — successful teams adapt the thinking and the latest trends and insights to their specific business landscapes.
Chris Martlew’s new book, Changing the Mind of the Organization — Building Agile Teams, is available at amazon.co.uk, amazon.com, bol.com and other good bookstores worldwide.
#mindoftheorg #OnBeingAgile
