Managing Agile Projects

Formal Team Structure

The mechanistic organizational model has been deployed with phenomenal economic success over the past century to provide great wealth and economies of scale. But, many of the wastes and inefficiencies visible on software development teams—long development cycles, poor quality, high failure rates, and customer dissatisfaction with finished products—are traceable to the mechanistic organizational model and the waterfall development model that relies on its linear, componentized approach. Why is this so, especially since it continues to perform well elsewhere—notably the fast-food and restaurant industries? This is because, fundamentally, the mechanistic model is designed for control in predictable environments, and it is inappropriate ...