Instead, I strive for predictable, sustainable, routine teams. That’s not to say the work is boring, far from it, but by making the process, governance routine, it disappears causes little if any churn, i.e. waste. Predictable supports planning and cost containment. Sustainable supports human growth and people management.

Heroics burns teams out, rapidly builds mistrust, cynicism, and mis-communication and drastically lowers quality.

Reliance upon heroics to deliver a release is a failure of planning and management, and increases the cost to deliver in terms of quality, trust and inefficiencies.

Unfortunately, the cult of the hero is quite well-ingrained in middle and upper management. There’s a rich vein of information for an MBA case study out there around the role of the Heroic Narrative in management reporting.

Geri

This!: http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/i_want_my_cheese/

Warfighting!

The U.S. Marines’ philosophy booklet.

-Tom

We all know the second team is what we all say we want, but the first team is what gets all the glory, awards and attention. At the team level, most people vastly prefer to work in the second environment, but at the management level, the incentive is all about reporting the first. You only have to look at motivational posters to see the prevalence of this sentiment.

This may work, at first, to the benefit of agile adoption, while it’s still seen as an Heroic Effort. But after a while, upper management tends to lose focus since there are no defining events that tell a compelling story. It’s all so routine. In other words, there’s not a whole lot requiring much “management,” only leadership and guidance of the product being worked on, which is more in the realm of the business stakeholders, and less glory for IT. For the IT managers, is more about process tweaking and guidance, which is much less interesting or feasible for most IT managers.

In many organizations, it just doesn’t make you look very interesting (at least to some sorts of managers) if in every management meeting all you have to report is “We delivered three releases, same as last meeting, with the same amount of scope as last time.”

There’s no sense of “dynamism,” no sense of “progression” or “continuous improvement” to tell a compelling story of onward and upward.

That’s why it’s important that if you are the manager of one of these boring (from a Heroic perspective), predictable teams, that your story should not be one focused on the efforts of the team, but on the outcome, the progress and dynamism of the product or system. It probably also helps to keep, at least for upper management, the same trappings of the War Room, the Heroic Effort and the Looming Crisis, even if your teams are just humming along doing predictable and routine delivery of extraordinary results.