Virtually anyone with even a casual interest in sports of any sort realize that success is about skill. Or as I like to say, skillz! Yet, again and again we see technical write-ups about the benefits of some project management formula. As though a philosophy is what creates a “killer app.” How many lines of Twitter code do you think @jack wrote? Got news for you… he wrote the first versions. Self-taught… now of course other people are doing the work & he’s spreading his own philosophies as though they are what made him successful. Consider the greatest NCAA basketball coach of all time, John Wooden. I really have no idea, I googled it, what I do know is this; if he is the best, even the worst coach of all time would whoop him if John’s team were comprised entirely of midgets.
Every successful coach does what it takes to recruit talent, and they admire talent. They don’t suffer a lot of talent-envy, or if they do, they keep it to themselves. They don’t gather together a bunch of untalented people to figure out how to avoid needing talent to win. They simply acknowledge the reality, when an individual is talented at a game they succeed.
Reality dictates this, not only in sports, but in every trade. I.T. is no exception. Without the chops, philosophies are useless. How many NFL meetings do you imagine include regular phrases like: “I know nothing about football but…”??? Yet in corporate boardrooms around the world a similar phrase has been uttered hundreds if not thousands of times just today! “I don’t really understand what you do, but …” followed by “coaching.”
Agility is a critical component to most sports. The Agile method builds an entire project management methodology around this fact. The most organic versions are direct to customer delivery. The 1000 releases-per-day approach is every bit as exciting as the Super Series Bowl Cup (me pretending to know nothing at all about sports) to us geeks. Think about this. How many technical recruiters said on a conference call today: “I don’t know what any of this means but…”? How many sports recruiters did that?
Considering all of this, we are forced to finally rescind our decades long recommendation and admiration of The Agile Method. R.I.P! The fact is, if you don’t have the chops, the skillz, the dedication. If you don’t have a team that sees your next project is a game and consists of athletes determined to win it, you’ll lose. Ok, ok… of course we’re not rescinding our adoration of The Agile Method. We’re just pointing out that some organizations simply do not belong in this league. Specifically, any organization that can appreciate the talent of a football player, medical practitioner, or carpenter, and will do what it takes to acquire such talent, but assumes that everyone with “sequel” on their resume will be able to cut it. In fact, there isn’t even a cut! Just whoever, whenever, however… No decent coach ever won anything but a participation trophy with that philosophy. If that’s your organization, DON’T DO AGILE! Have huge meetings, talk a lot… talk a lot again the same time next week. You certainly won’t be any less successful that way.
I may well need to delete this post in the next few days. I recently finished reading “The Phoenix Project.” That combined with classics like Hayek’s “The Fatal Conceit” has me rethinking a lot of things. The Agile Method is a truly organic approach to reality. Traditional project management attempts to mold reality to fit, Agile molds itself around reality. It’s not for everyone, least of all those that think that DevOps is a: “build it and they will come” affair.
That’s where no method will work for your agency. Every move becomes a literal gamble, complete with big losses. “The House” (reality) never loses. You can try to rearrange facts to fit a narrative of the value of your idea, but just like an NFL line of scrimmage is a grueling reality so is the information technology world. Wishful thinking will not solve problems. Talent will.
Yugo, Corolla, Ferrari? Reality can be a harsh task master. No matter how much you wish you could fly, if you jump off a cliff it’s unlikely your delusion will last long. You DON’T always get what you pay for in software. The digital age has brought with it far too much dynamic impracticality, You could pay for a Ferrari & get a Yugo if you trust vendors to handle this for you. The Agile process can spare you the billion dollar disaster that is repeated daily across the globe, but ONLY if you have the “Ferrari” in your staff. That includes leadership – the “coaches” – talent for leadership is a talent too. If you’re not up for this then you might as well find the next slick salesman that comes along and sell out your company’s future to whatever vendor they represent, because The Agile Method can’t make up for that. It can’t make up for highly politicized boards, it can’t make up for irrational fantasies. It’s reality, it’s practicality, it’s assured success, but it’s not delusional. It fails when the goal is delusion.