This week I had the pleasure of having lunch with a Marcato partner and a new acquaintance. The conversation started as they always do – talk about our respective backgrounds and experiences and given the small size of this town, looking for points where our paths nearly crossed. Then the story turns to the common themes of my own experiences leading up to the decision to found Marcato – building Agile, high functioning teams, supporting distributed development, creating and rewarding a culture of performance, a focus on shipping as the ultimate expression of our art, etc. Then magic happens…
When you get to this point, you either connect or you don’t. I had no idea what would happen, because frankly, the organization where he works today is not really known for its technology accomplishments or savvy. Rather, it has the curse of deep pockets, allowing it to fund teams that are too large to be effective and goals too audacious to ship. Would there be too large a gap for finding common ground?
Hardly. We seemed to first click over comparing notes between our mutual experiences with large organizations that want to have or use software technology but just can’t seem to figure out how. We agreed that it is due to fundamental mistrust of the practitioners (partially well founded – come on folks, admit it – the software highway is littered with the smoking ruins of past edifices to the gods) but also largely due to forcing upon those teams resource and project managers that simply do not understand the technology and people that they are trying to lead.
Banning State Park - Sandstone, MN
Then things really started to pick up as the conversation turned to past experiences with high functioning teams. We all got more animated as we learned about his experiences building and leading a large IT organization that operated top to bottom as an Agile team should. We talked about the challenges of convincing the business, marketing, and product managers to break the culture of “up front contract” but how once people have crossed over they become converts for life and never want to cross back.
We talked about the team he had built years ago – how he had recruited them, how they were organized, how they functioned, what they delivered – everything was picture perfect. This was when I knew I was talking to a true believer – his energy wasn’t coming from intellectual curiosity based on something he had read in a book or blog but from the clarity of vision that comes from having experienced something profound. He had built something special, and you could tell both that he missed it and that lightning would definitely strike more than once – this was a leader that knew what he wanted and whose energy and enthusiasm could move people to change.
Unfortunately, I’m not sure that opportunity will happen in the organization he is in – they would have to realize that they need to place their trust in leaders like him and invest in letting them organize for success. It was painfully obvious to all of us that they had far too many people working on their projects, and worse yet, that they lacked the management visibility to be able to accurately identify the bottom 25% of the performers so that they could start to fix it. A vicious cycle to perpetuate mediocrity on the whole despite the efforts and talents of a few scattered throughout the organization.
I think there is an unwarranted association with this problem being evident in organizations using offshore teams. Granted, it’s easy to let this happen, but it all hinges on the quality of personnel you maintain in the onshore part of the organization. If you retain and recruit the best people you can find for these critical roles and make sure that they have a sustainable lifestyle, then great things can happen. If you try to eliminate this layer by using a combination of business analysts as architects and project managers as leaders (probably even sourced by the offshore provider), then you will get poorly conceived and poorly executed projects.
Our guest said something particularly profound that I’ll attempt to paraphrase: ”They are smart enough to know that their purchasing department should be led by people that used to be buyers or their finance team by someone that used to be an accountant, but for some reason they don’t think the leaders of the software teams need to be people that used to build, test, and ship products.” I have certainly seen that in my own career and it likely explains why I am always attracted to software “product” companies instead of IT organizations within a larger entity. The latter needs software systems but do not understand them, the former lives and breathes them – they are the “factory” and the business is built around creating and sustaining a software eco-system or it fails. A large manufacturer can have sub-par internal applications and still be successful.
It’s always good to meet another true believer – it gives me hope for what we are trying to accomplish with Marcato. I find it hard to believe that we will not find a way, some how, some day, to work together.
