- Deliver the highest possible quality and service to the customer
- Develop employee potential based upon mutual respect and cooperation
- Reduce cost through the elimination of waste in any given process
- Build a flexible production site that can respond to changes in the market
I've started to work through Agile Web Development with Rails. In Chapter One, there is this section titled Rails Is Agile (1.1).
Let’s look at the values expressed in the Agile Manifesto as a set of four preferences. Agile development favours the following.
- Individual and interactions over processes and tools
- Working software over comprehensive documentation
- Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
- Responding to change over following a plan
Last week we had a talk at work about Project Management (PM), went for about an hour.
At the end I expressed my opinion that Project Management trended to make an organization too lean. Lean in another sense of the work, as in over worked!.
This weakens the organization in three ways.
- Insufficient resources to respond to the unexpected, particularly human resources.
- Lack of maintenance of corporate assets, like the code base.
- Lack of deep infrastructure planning. When I say deep, I mean the shared resources used by most operational activities, including human resources.
Noone actively disagreed with me, including the three Project Managers present.
Been thinking about it more. Thinking triggered by this Seth Godin post & Jason’s post above.
The trouble with PM is when the organization develops a minimum cost/big bang approach to doing things. Be as low cost as possible, gets bodies in to do a job, gets rid of bodies at the end. The public sector is really prown to this!
One issue is that the milestone become the end all. How do you avoid this, it’s natural, the money has got to be tied to something.
PM ends up big on following Process, big on Doco, big on the Plan and big on Contract Negotiation (due to scope creep), putting it at odds with the agile preferences! These are all forms of waste in Lean terms!
Now I’m all in favour of project management (all lower case).
To steal Rowan Bunning’s tag line
"In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless,
but planning is indispensable." - Dwight D. Eisenhower
pm makes you think, it’s acting on the useless plans that is a waste.
Where to now?
Well the opposite of minimum cost/big bang management would be maximum effectiveness/steady state management.
What would that look like?
Maximum effectiveness means you’re not measuring costs. You are measuring outcome to expenditure ratios. Further more time and none monetary factors don’t go straight out the front door, as they do when what is being measured, is measured in dollars
Steady state implies that you keep a large core of personnel who maintain existing activities, do projects as needed and are there for the unexpected. You supplement them with specialists and contractor as they’re needed.
Another way of looking at this, is to treat employee as profit centres. That mean the organization tries to develop its employee full potential.
Gnoll110
Technorati tags:
project+management lean agile agile+manifesto
