Teams, People and “Resources” – The Culture of Agility
by Mishkin Berteig, 9 May 2011 | Agile Teams
This post is from Agile Advice - Working With Agile Methods (Scrum, OpenAgile, Lean) by Mishkin Berteig. Click here to see the original post in full.
In an Agile culture, it is considered rude to refer to people as “resources”. People are not fungible – you cannot just take any old developer and plug them into any old project. Skills, personalities, likes, talents, potential all are so dynamic and unique for each individual person. So any management theory (including traditional project management) that treats people as “resources” like oil, gold or computers, is making an unjust simplification at the expense of the people working in the organization.Yet organizations need to be able to plan where to spend money, and certainly the people working in an organization are often one of the largest costs. From a financial perspective, from a business perspective, it makes sense to somehow treat people costs in the same way as other operational costs… and this often leads to dehumanizing people to the point of treating them like resources.
So how can these legitimate organizational needs for budgeting mesh with the equally legitimate approach of Agile to treating people as unique actors be merged? It is actually quite simple, but the ramifications are deep: treat TEAMS as resources. Teams become the fundamental building blocks of an organization. Teams move from project to project or program to program or operation to operation. There is still a need to support the individuals in an organization, but it is done in the context of teams.
part of why it happens like this, is that in the accountancy packages (or I should say accountancy laws), people are booked on the expenses part.
If a company buys an office, it’s booked on the investment side.
So the law encourage companies to think of their people as a costs. Not as an investment. While the offices, cars, computers are investments….
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