Companies have a hard time with giving the reigns over to teams to do design, come up with optional solutions and technical directions, and deliver value without having to get a hundred approvals and revisions.
When you think about it, the subject of not trusting and constantly over-riding developer decisions should appall us all. Afterall, are they not the subject matter experts? Are they not the most qualified to push us out of our comfort zones and consider newer, better, faster ways of delivering value to the consumer? Yet, for some reason, red/orange outcome-based companies continue to put the clamps on design to the point where teams have been relegated to pedestrian ‘doers,’ robotically obeying what has been handed down to them, rather than challenging the status quo.
Though much of the blame is on traditional, archaic management practices and command-and-control cultures, teams and the individuals on those teams must shoulder some of the blame as well. Teams must assume their rightful role as the experts by standing up against bad design, pushed-through and rushed deadlines that allow technical debt to mount, and inefficient outcomes that do not delight the customer. If teams are to be taken seriously in becoming that autonomous force that we need them to be, they must not acquiesce to checking with every supervisor and leader over them before making bold moves.
In Hummingbird Agile, we burn the ships when it comes to being all-in on promoting autonomous crews and producers. Design, built-in quality and built-in innovation are pushed down into the delivery time-box and into the hands of those we pay to provide great solutions. This saves hundreds of hours in pre-planning and bad designs that can be reinvested into heads-down production. In our book, Hummingbird Agile, Chapter 8 addresses in greater detail how we go about setting up crews for success.
Register for a workshop to hear more about Hummingbird Agile crews.
