When faced with a lot of information, we might end of making wrong decisions. Add to that, when we also work with many different groups of colleagues, the manners with which work is done is factored by social processes and custom, written and unseen convention, and various personal and group dynamics at play, which may also be time critical. Imagine at 10:30am one group of colleagues wants recommendation from all relevant groups on the purchase of a building, let’s say to expand our space.
At the same time, there is another round of calls fo recommendation for replacing chairs in the welcome space in the existing building. We might think that purchasing the building will take much more time to make progress, however, because it makes use of well-tested procedures, working across key individuals who already know each other well, that round of recommendation was done by lunchtime. In contrast, the chairs in the welcome space has a long history, that the act of getting rid of them (or making them disappear) has caused major upset with some colleagues. That, nobody knew about until the idea was surfaced that morning. With not much existing workflows in place, and working across all employees group, this has turned out to be a task where effectively the existing chairs must somehow remain, and at the same time, we have chairs that we usable. The first group of chairs and the second are not necessarily the same.
That is many words to illustrate something more complex. Many ideas have been brought forward to priorities what is important to deal with, and ring round resources to work on them. Generally speaking, “Agile” has become a bearer of a work culture standard where we try to allocated resources to prioritised items, to deliver them in some predefined timeline. This has proved to be a good tool or approach, since it helps us to make the important to be really important, the less important to be really not that important after all, and then we negotiate resources for those that fall in between.
While Agile (and similar techniques) have been regarded as a good tool or approach, we cannot avoid the “a lot of information” to go through in each major delivery point, or “milestone”. While it is not the intention, it has a strong bearing on “focus on work and not the worker”. Of course the underlying principle – to work with the customer and deliver to them in good time – is a very good one, and many Agile projects have achieved that, it often means that the worker is the third in ranking order of well-being, the second being the mechanism to ensure we are on target (e.g. scrum, kanba, XP), with the top priority being the customer.
It is true that where workers’ own personalities have come in the way of whether the work is done, is done in good time etc. And to some extent, a by-product, and requirement, for Agile is that personal ways of working becomes secondary (or erased) when we adopt such Agile ways of working. That means, individual mental health being might be at risk. It might take the industry a few rounds of making Agile work to realise the great discrepancies for employees well-being.
