THE HUMAN x TECHNOLOGY PARADOX: When you think Agile, just be minimalist
Technology is ideal to improve human life. That's the project, the focus, and the function.
The manifesto for Agile development prone usability to face complexity in 4 different ways:
- Promoting interactions between individuals through software
- Sustaining efficient software during the development cycle
- Stimulating user collaboration to guide upgrades
- Being able to manage change permanently
However, when it comes to the adaptation of these guidelines in Human Resources (HR) and Marketing (MKT) management, things might get over complicated instead of simplified. And that's what I want to highlight here.
Indeed, Agile should help strategize the self systemization of cross functional teams, what HR and MKT teams have to deal with daily, and even heavier in the technology industry. The paradox starts when thousands of frameworks are attributable to Agile but just few are chosen by the majority of companies.
The most common misconception about Agile methodologies manifest in the belief that planning will be no longer required and leaders are no longer needed. As if following Agile collective principles would replace the individual responsibility for permanent learning.
A good example is the trend for Scrum applications, that if we look closer, might not be the ideal approach depending on your company's type of products or reputation you want to establish. However it has been over used on different markets just because it can facilitate dealing with big data, a growing technical challenge. Problem is even in processes that struggle dealing with big data, Scrum should be just an option if your company doesn't have to deal with heavy data streaming, or complex events in general. Scrum method demands constant evaluation of factors, what can be overwhelming and time consuming to manage collectively. The risks of biases are increased as well in this case. And then people wonder why there is so little diversity in the technology world...
In my research and model for cooperative networking management I have highlighted the importance of distinguishing the difference between the individual and collective dimensions of cooperation. The team work only happens in Agile processes when the individuals learn in parallel with the development tasks, including leaders. Despite the fact that Scrum focuses on common goals, as an empirical project framework, it might facilitate missing what the motivations are. The cooperation process might have the goal as an output, it still depends on motivation as an input. Other Agile methodologies are more aware of that and should be considered case-by-case. XP better focus on the costumer, Lean JIT will help facing surprises, Kanban optimizes the work flow and focus on tasks one by one, and UP will value the stakeholders. Not only crisis but also opportunities could be managed better if there was less standardization of management methods.
A development methodology should reflect the sum of the individual producers motivation meeting costumers and stakeholders needs. That's the challenge that both HR and MKT teams should help solving. But entire companies have been following software development frameworks without adapting them to the HR and MKT points of view, that are closer from the real people involved.
If software has eaten the world, then Agile has eaten the software world. (Jeff Gothelf, Harvard Business Review, 2017)
This type of management disintegration can harm the entire production process, generating bureaucracy, that will result in poor workers retention and more volatility of costumers loyalty, finally stressing the sales departments that will end up pressuring the executives to make financial decisions that are not human centered as the Agile philosophy proposed to be. That's one of the reasons the global innovation is able to generate wealth but only by increasing inequality. The entire company's reputation can be handicapped by following framework trends without understanding the company's business purpose, its mission, and internal rhythms. While the Development and the MKT can work together on campaigns, the HR has much longer cycles, quarterly and annual, besides dealing with hiring and firing, that are not taken in consideration in other departments. Although everybody can still imagine that technology could make the world fairer and most people in technology companies want to be part of that type of development. What are we waiting for?
Choosing the right Agile framework for each situation and dimension is therefore very important to benefit from its work process simplification, a minimalist culture. Getting the wrong approach is on the other hand a sign that technology is being treated as human replacement, and technology is not an end by itself, but simply a medium in the production process.
Why is Agile a minimalist work methodology?
- It identifies with the essence of the purpose
- It aims to omit needless thoughts
- It makes work life balance relevant
- It treats development principles as a daily habit
Is Agile being truly implemented despite its popularity? I would not say so.
What happened with the support departments now? They have been replaced by help forums that supposedly are empowered by Artificial Intelligence (AI), except that they are not. This virus of misunderstanding the minimalist culture of Agile is spreading even inside the support features, that less and less listen and more and more try to persuade that the systems that no longer interact are still right. And what justifies that? lack of enough skilled Data Scientists?
Big Data Analysis is not a challenge that can be reduced by interrupting the communication between people, it's even amplified when we do that. Again, the problem is a learning gap, not a coding gap.
We must never loose focus that Agile is simply a tool dedicated to optimize the technology delivery process on behalf of their producers and users. It's ultimate goal is to make everyone's life easier and better, producers and costumers lives. No matter how complex it seems to scale that idea, AI is already able to help us with that... if only our producers assume their responsibility for permanent learning development. In Production engineering, we call this cognitive engineering, by the way.
Due to the promise of Agile making everything simpler, Human Resources and Marketing managers are leading their production process into a culture of product management when what is being produced most often in the information and internet technology industries is actually still literally a service, besides it will always be about mediating human interaction. This type of nomination of the production, is another sign of the Agile culture being corrupted against people. No matter what code we develop, the coding is a Media between coder and user, the final purpose will always be the development of better human relationships. Human relations are not a product. To market services is not likely to develop a product either. Creating a product does not mean to develop production either.
In the beginning of the globalization of the capitalist economy, we must remember (not so long ago), the manufacturing sector still dominated the trades, while today almost 80% of the US economy, for example, is based on services. The Information Technology industry has rapidly grown because of the economic success of the internet corporations counting on the Agile management methods, but let's remember as well, part of these frameworks were created initially to improve the manufacturing performance. It is not a strategy then, to call technology, a product, but lack of adaptation to a change that has already happened in the structure of the global economy more than one decade ago. Calling technology as service demands much more responsibilities, than calling it a product. And I want to say that it is time.
Even if Agile can facilitate time management and guide on financial cuts, performance needs from the manufacturing sector, it was born to first of all and ultimately making the user experience more pleasurable, including of the workers. Departments like HR and MKT need to become aware of that.
Machine learning will only progress in technology companies when their managers and strategists understand that the value of human relations is at the same time the input and the output of the production process, not the coding. HR and MKT leaders should interact with developers in a way that together they can help people to feel empowered, not rejected or manipulated by digital media. This is what Agile software development is about. This is our chance now.
Technology innovation today is no longer about product production but changing to become a process of human development. And that's what Agile can do for all of us: showing us a vision of a future that is humanized by the technology, not a zombie about it. Technology is part of humanity, it's our creation, developed to be a solution.
We need to learn to learn in order to expect being able to develop machine learning. Big data is our chance to learn how to humanize technology, not an excuse to replace people by coding. At the end of the equation, technology can replace everything except our ability to create humanly. Let's be hybrid, but as minimalists, interacting smarter and smarter.
References: The Agile Manifesto, Agile for dummies by IBM, Oracle Agile Product Lifecycle management