The Art of Agile Development

The Importance of Organizational Success

Organizational success is often neglected by software teams in favor of the more easily achieved technical and personal successes. Rest assured, however, that even if you’re not taking responsibility for organizational success, the broader organization is judging your team at this level. Senior management and executives aren’t likely to care if your software is elegant, maintainable, or even beloved by its users; they care about results. That’s their return on investment in your project. If you don’t achieve this sort of success, they’ll take steps to ensure that you do.

Unfortunately, senior managers don’t usually have the time or perspective to apply a nuanced solution to each project. They wield swords, not scalpels. They rightly expect their project teams to take care of fine details.

When managers are unhappy with your team’s results, the swords come out. Costs are the most obvious target. There are two easy ways to cut them: set aggressive deadlines to reduce development time, or ship the work to a country with a lower cost of labor. Or both.

These are clumsy techniques. Aggressive deadlines end up increasing schedules rather than reducing them [McConnell 1996] (p. 220), and offshoring has hidden costs [Overby].

Do aggressive deadlines and the threat of offshoring sound familiar? If so, it’s time for your team to take back responsibility for its success: not just for personal or technical success, but for organizational success as well. ...