Bill Clinton summed it up beautifully when he used the line, “It’s the economy, stupid.”
It has just become frustratingly obvious to me of late that when it comes to organisations maximising their investment in technology, a lot of their energy is misguided. In the spirit of Bill:
It’s the people, stupid!
Focus on the people first and foremost and everything else will stem from that. However, when I say focus on the people, I don’t mean make hierarchical command and control structures where everyone clearly has a place and protocol rules over productivity. Rather the approach of flat structures where the emphasis is on self-organising teams, getting things done and self-improvement.
Of course, I’m not the first person to think of this, the whole Agile movement is driven on this organisational approach.
Organisations seem to believe that the way to solve problems is based on preferencing technology first, then process, then lastly the people will fall into line. And big technology product vendors go a long way to supporting this type of thinking. Many times they’ll pitch to executives with how they can make their technical people work smarter by using their products and tools. But this often results in forcing technology upon talented technical people which will always be met with resistance and frustration. The products may make the execs feel better in the short term but will usually demoralise the people and make them feel powerless.
Reverse this approach around; focus on the people first, and STOP! Empowering people by encouraging them to collaborate and self organise has proven to raise engagement they have with the organisation. It starts to build up one of the most valuable assets that a organisation could hope for, social contracts. People will start to work out what are the most appropriate ways that they can work together. They’ll remove bottlenecks that stop them from getting things done. They’ll work out what technologies are best for the problem at hand.
People will be as stupid as you force them to be and as creative as you’ll let them be.
So why the rant? Well, its time for me to put my money where my mouth is. I’ve banged on long enough about the benefits of adopting a more Agile approach to maximising an organisation’s investment in technology. At Agile’s core is focusing on empowering people. The outcome should lead to what organisations really want – true and sustainable competitive advantage!
As of tomorrow, I’m going to step away from my technical career path and move into a more people focused direction. Time for me to really prove what I believe in, not just for myself but for the people that I work with. I want the win-win situation, the organisation wins and the people win! Here goes…
Truer words have never been spoken! Can you suggest any Collaboration Tools or Strict Processes that could help us apply this to our workforce?
Well, I was hoping that we could get the sales guy in from IBM or HP – I’m sure they would have some technology and processes that they would be happy to apply to us!
But seriously (!), Lo-fi tools (i.e. butchers paper, big visual boards) and processes that have rules (i.e. Scrum), just not ones that constrict. Getting interested in Kanban http://www.limitedwipsociety.org/. Perhaps a better alternative to some of the more prescriptive approaches like Scrum with regards to introducing Agile and Lean to teams.
Some of the teams here are trying kanban because the fixed sprint is too prescriptive. In truth for a lot of our system we release individual components as a constant dribble instead of at the end of the sprint.