Something’s gotta give

Tom Breur

4 December 2016

Agile has been too often portrayed as the new snake oil, so small wonder management often expects to get a free lunch. You can hardly blame them for expecting magic, when that’s what they get promised all the time… In my experience, though, any reasonable manager, can relate to trade-offs.

If management wants more products, better quality, faster delivery, it is only normal that you explain this in terms of a trade-off. If your people can do magic, you just snap your fingers. If they’re human, you discuss trade-offs. Something has got to give, if you are looking for more or faster. Because if you keep doing what you did, the most likely outcome is that you will keep getting what you always got. Want something else? Well, then let’s see where we can trade.

For organizations that are firmly rooted in Waterfall, one of the easiest and most obvious trade-offs to propose (although it may not be so easy to implement), is letting go of some of the upfront documentation. If you can replace reams of paperwork with face-to-face collaboration, you may not be doing more, but you can certainly do less (paperwork), and still get results sooner. It’s not rocket science, something’s gotta give…