Ocean’s Eleven: The perfect agile model?
One of the things I love about Scrum is that it treats team members like adults. Teams, not managers, decide what work they do in each Sprint and how to estimate it. Teams decide how to adapt their processes to maximize their efforts. Teams decide who the best person is to accept a task. Teams decide what the common goal is and they stay focused on it until it is achieved. We all get to act like grown-ups again. We all have a stake in the outcome of our process and we all have input into how we achieve our goals. However, along with this flexibility comes responsibility; responsibility to the Team and to the Product Owner to deliver value and quality. For all of this to occur, an organization must have a culture that not only supports this kind of thinking, but also thrives on it. The organization must foster a culture that respects individuals as intelligent adults who have a valuable set of skills.
I was reading an article in Business Week today about Netflix. Netflix has a very interesting culture that not only promotes innovation in the way people rent movies, but also in the way its managers and its staff work. The founder and CEO of Netflix, Reed Hastings, describes the culture there as “freedom and responsibility”. Netflix believes its culture is a fully formed adult culture. To that end, Netflix employees are paid above average salaries, have unlimited vacation, and can determine how to structure their compensation packages. In exchange for these luxuries, the folks at Netflix are expected to be über performers. The level of responsibility is very high for individuals within the company. The marketing director at Netflix says “There is no place to hide”. If you think this sounds a lot like a place that would embrace Agile practices, you’d be correct. Netflix has successfully employed Agile practices to create a website that has been rated by independent researchers as number one in the world for customer satisfaction for two consecutive years.
The whole Netflix culture is properly geared to not only support Agile software development practices, but also to recruit the best talent to produce the highest value and quality for its customers. While most companies go to great lengths to pay their best talent the least amount possible, Netflix does the exact opposite. They believe in building what their CEO calls “talent density” by allowing their talent hunters to recruit top managers, developers, etc., with the mantra “Money is no object”. In addition, annual salary increases are tied to the current job market; Netflix constantly amps up salaries to retain their best talent. H.L. Arledge at Decade Software has stated that “sometimes employees become dissatisfied because they fear they are not getting what they are worth or someone led them to believe that the grass is greener somewhere else.” Netflix has effectively removed this variable from their talent retention equation.
So, with an adult culture and a highly paid workforce, it’s almost inevitable that innovation, quality, and value stream forward from Netflix. One of the developers at Netflix describes the culture there as very much like the team in Ocean’s Eleven: They recruit the best of the best, everyone gets a good cut of the take, there is the flexibility for individuals to do what they do best, and the whole team stays focused and united on a common goal. So maybe that’s the key: every organization striving to be truly Agile needs a Danny Ocean at the helm. It could very well be that Ocean’s Eleven is the perfect Agile model.
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I’m often frustrated because few people at any of the software companies I’ve worked think about team members who are NOT developers, managers, users, or testers. And who am I talking about? I’m talking about people who have to write user documentation and training materials.
I’m lucky enough to have a background in usability, so some Agile teams accept me and I develop UI mockups to accompany user stories. These help illustrate user stories so developers can get an idea of the “user experience.” They also help me write fledgling documentation and training materials.But many traditional writers are are left out in the cold. They either document everything at the end, or try to psychically try to figure out what’s ready to be documented.
Instead, Agile teams should embrace writers and welcome them to the team. Writers are great people to help develop stories or UI ideas. Why? Because they must constantly put themselves in the shoes of the users in order to explain things to them.
So, I highly recommend getting writers on your team and letting them take an active part in clarifying and walking through user stories, sketching UI designs (they often have better visual skills than developers), and testing software like a user. Writers are very often the “voice of the user”among a sea of developers.
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