Chris Johnston

A friend of mine told me about this article in which James Shore writes about his experience trying to “change a company over to Agile”:http://www.jamesshore.com/Change-Diary/. This trick for this series of articles is that he had no power to actually affect a change; he was a simple peon working as a developer.

The one statement that stands out the most to me from the entire series is:

The “technical solution” mindset basically takes the approach that problems are best solved by the introduction of some new technology. “We need a framework” is a common one I see in companies that do multiple projects. (This is particularly common. I haven’t seen it work yet.) “We need a project management tool” is a common refrain among people adopting a new process.

There’s nothing wrong with tools as tools. They’re good at making established processes more efficient. The problem is that the technical solution mindset focuses on making symptoms very efficient rather than solving underlying root causes, which are almost always people-oriented.

The reason that it stands out is this is very close to the attitude of people where I work now. Although they recognize that part of the problem exists with people, their solution is to create a “Data Management Framework” and hope that technology can solve their problems.

Instead of just writing about the author’s day to day struggles with change, the articles offer a “then-and-now” type analysis. The main part is in the style of a diary which was written while Shore was trying make the changes. The second part is an analysis done four years later. Most of the time, the later analysis is more interesting than the diary part as it provides a more objective view of what really happened.