In Brian J. Robertson’s book, he describes Holacracy as a new “Operating System”. I take it that Robertson tried to come up with a metaphor and used one that made sense for him as an IT person (switching from Windows to MacOS is a huge cultural change for us). However, there was loud criticism around exactly that metaphor, pointing out that individuals working together is so much more, and how could Robertson not see that!?
So once again, new tools and methods are always coming with deep cultural changes, there is no plug & play.
To illustrate this lengthy and sometimes painful path, this blog post aims to give a glimpse on how my personal cultural change went.
How did I “Become Agile”?
In the beginning…
…my project management word was not exactly a formless void , but one could say there was a lot darkness. My education and experience gained in my first jobs conditioned me that planning was always waterfall. This is how good project managers do it, and if anything does not work out according to plan, it is your fault – you didn’t plan hard enough.
So the projects came and went, I planned and MS Project’ed as best as I could. Never would we even consider to start a project without precisely specifying the scope, having the price fixed and the date set.
Let us gather in one place
One day, my key account called me with an emergency. A machine they had built, the result of more than a year’s work, was sitting at the airport, held up by customs. An important document was missing, and without the document, to customs approval, without approval no money in the bank. My client asked for an exception to our normal modus cooperandi. He OK’ed to pay for all hours we will accrue, and asked to leave all upfront specification aside this time. The request literally was to “just please help us fix it”, so I went.
At the customer’s site, we all sat in a big war room-like setting, from engineers to technical writers to software developers. We were able to complete the documentation and the machine was shipped on time. My managers had warned me that this project would explode under my fingers, but we actually were in scope, below the budget treshold we had set with quality and satisfaction levels higher than usual.
So what happened? We perceived us to just have been lucky.
Click.
Shortly after that, I went to a trade show, which was basically a meet and greet for customers of a certain manufacturer. The key note (I guess unknowingly) highlighted the irony that in production we are Lean, while in our project management we do not welcome change at all, and rather grow fat with processes and red tape.
Click.
Lean. Kanban. I took notes of all those words I haven’t heard before, and later that day started to read. The reading did not stop since then, from “The Machine that changed the world“, to Taiichi Ohno, to Ford all the way to Forrester’s “Industrial Dynamics”.
I tried Lean concepts in my own projects and found I was actually more flexible in my decisions and achieved shorter lead times…I was even Learning to see. To apply the concept of Kanban boards, I shanghai’d a friend into putting together something with JavaScript (Jira Software was still coming without boards, you had to buy a module called GreenHopper).
From Lean to Agile
From there, it did not take long until I stumbled upon the Agile Manifesto. Interactions over processes…Welcome change…Collaboration over contracts...exactly what we did during this “emergency project”. Remember, the whole team sat in a room and left the processes aside, organized around finishing the product as soon as possible in optimal quality.
Until that moment, I had been somewhat under the impression that we invented something new. And here it was, exactly what we accidentially did right, all nicely written down.
I signed the Agile Manifesto and since then am using my various roles to be an Agile Catalyst.
