Are you “in” or “out”?

Tom Breur

11 May 2014

Agile is no panacea for making teams more efficient. As a matter of fact, you could argue that being less efficient is just fine. That is why having sufficient slack in your team is so important. Allow yourself some time to reflect, from time to time; “are we still on the right path?”

Many Agile and Lean practices are geared toward being more effective: building the right solution, rather than building ‘a’ solution faster. Embracing the end-to-end value chain is critically important for successful teams. Leveraging all the wisdom, in the collective brains across the value is crucially important to be effective.

There is one caveat, however. Many IT and software projects can be incomprehensible to “outsiders.” End-users contribute in requirements sessions, and the IT goes “of” to build their solution. Small(er) feedback loops avoid going down rabbit holes, but the process from requirements to tangible delivery is largely a black box for many stakeholders involved. So they don’t feel a part of it.

Gojko Adzic has written a wonderful book called “Specification by Example” where he explains the importance of keeping everybody in the loop. To this end he makes a compelling case for writing specification in human readable format. How many (technical) specification documents have you read that were “accessible” to business partners? It’s the exception, rather than the rule.

Teamwork requires people to be involved. You want people “in.” But unless specifications are “human readable” (to you, and anybody else involved), business stakeholders can hardly be a part of making a system work ‘right’, and be effective.