Prisoners of Our Habits - Act Four

Prisoners of Our Habits. Act three. Executive manager enters.

Executive manager is reading an email from project manager
"Dear Sir, I overheard this developer, John Smith, saying
his technical solution may cause $1.00 increase
in bill-of-material."

EXEC'MNG: -"Stop the press. This John Smith starts
immediately to investigate alternative solutions,
what ever they are."

Product under development may have hundreds of relationships. Tradeoffs between these relationships are being made in hourly basis. When one of these issues gets taken away from the context, it may seem like a big deal. The big deal in fact is when a bad decision (based on bad information) like one above is made the project environment, a complex adaptive system (CAS), gets an unexpected input. What happens in CAS is totally unpredictable. Typically the system is pushed into chaos and disorder. This is why agile development blocks these inputs from the team for a certain time, and opens the window for these new inputs only frequently enough. Command and control is traditional way of managing projects. Developers have not been encouraged to self-organize traditionally.

And old habits are slow to die.

I know paradigm shift is extremely slow, and so does James Shore (see his Change Diary). I'll be on vacation for couple of weeks and after that it would be perfect time to reflect and adjust the course of this agile journey. I just hope couple of weeks is enough for the old batteries.