Thu 4 Mar 2010
Taking Sides
Once upon a time, Frederick Winslow Taylor and W. Edwards Deming lined up across a ping-pong table and went at it.
“There is only one correct way to do any job!” said Taylor, smashing one of those real curvy, tricky serves at Deming.
“Let people contribute in the best way that they can envision,” retorted Deming as he calmly returned the serve from 8 feet behind the table.
“Employees are evil and lazy!” screamed Taylor as he sliced a murderous shot high into the air, the backspin causing a local singularity in the spacetime continuum.
“The success of the company is good for all, and people want to succeed,” offered Deming, backhanding a low shot with sideways spin just over the net.
“Managers are the ones that know the answers!” shouted Taylor, cutting his forehand all the way across the table.
“Hmmmmm,” said Deming, who could be a very thoughtful guy given the right circumstances, “the people closest to the problem are more likely to come up with a correct answer.”
“Supervision!”
“Empowerment.”
“Punishment!”
“Trust.”
And on and on. They never did finish the game.
Here’s the interesting thing: we’re still playing this ping-pong game.
Here’s another interesting thing: many people don’t seem to know it.
Many people make the mistake of viewing Scrum and Agile and Lean as sets of practices. “If I do kanban, I’m Lean.” “If I do sprints, I’m scrummy.” “If I do BDUF and most of my projects are late, then I’m waterfall.” (Oops, well, the last one is actually true, but the first two aren’t.)
The thing is, you’re not Lean unless your company commits to the two pillars of Lean: continuous improvement and developing people. You’re not Agile unless you create and foster self-organizing teams. You might be doing a lot of Agile practices, and you might even get better results than you used to, but you won’t be Agile. If you accept this limitation and you are doing Scrum, then you will be doing ScrumBut.
So I smile to myself (I think it’s to myself) when I hear management say things like “We’ll never be totally Agile in this company. There will always be waterfall projects.” I smile because what that really means is that they’ll never be Agile at all. Lean and Agile fit into the framework of Deming’s System of Profound Knowledge. Plan-driven, hierarchical command & control methods descend from Taylor. You can’t follow both at the same time.
Really? Yes. Would those managers supervise and micromanage some employees while supporting and developing others? Would they dictate commitments and solutions to some while allowing others to determine their own fate? Would they trust the people on the Agile projects and punish the ones on the waterfall projects? Would they hold individuals accountable on waterfall projects while holding teams accountable on Agile projects?
Of course not.
What they will do is treat everybody the way they always have. They will beam with pride when teams gather in their little circles every day, and then they will dictate to them that the manager is actually still responsible for delivery and ask for lists of who will be assigned to which task in the next sprint. They will refuse to make priority decisions and instead direct people to work on multiple projects at a time, and they might even decide just how many design documents each team should have. They will do this because that’s how un-Agile projects do it and for some reason this makes management require it of all teams. (What has always seemed odd to me is that they won’t demand that waterfall teams release an increment of working software each month because the Agile teams do it. So I guess it only works one way.)
And they’ll wonder why this Agile thing gets so much hype, since it really doesn’t seem all that different from what they’ve always done. And really, the results aren’t that great.
You can’t be both Agile and not Agile. You can’t be both Lean and fat…er…not Lean. Not at the same time.
If your company is not fully committed to agility then you won’t achieve it, and your results will be a self-fulfilling prophecy of unrealized potential.
About the Author: Alan Atlas is a Soul Musician, Certified Scrum Trainer, and Agile Coach at Rally Software Development. Subscribe today to get free updates by email or RSS.









