Agile Project Crimping AKA Agile Shanghai
I'm coining a phrase - "Agile Project Crimping" - stealing the best people from a project in flight to do a different project, under the guise of "Were Agile, right?" Syn. Agile Shanghai.
So many orgs think that people are stateless. That you can swap them between projects without any impact.
It seems especially to happen to orgs new to Agile / Scrum. A new Scrum project is cooking along and everything is working great. Tremendous productivity, like they've never seen before.
But theres this other project thats in trouble or just starting up.
So, what do they do?
STEAL FROM PETER TO PAY PAUL.
They quite nearly knock the smartest folks over the head, stuff them in a gunny sack and shanghai them onto the new project.
It works once or twice, sometimes but never in the long run and rarely in short run.
It has the following impacts:
- Velocity of existing project is now unreliable because you tampered with the team
- negatively affect team cohesion (assuming they liked the folks shanghaied)
- loss of tribal knowledge - the ones they steal are usually the best and brightest
- the original project is now likely to have a vacuum filled with with a newbie that needs to ramp up
- Newbies consume oxygen and precious people time to ramp up
- People you pull off the project get fatigued
- You are building a hero culture
- A sign that you don't truly grok agile concepts
Don't do it.
Don't be a Agile Crimp!
Don't do the ole' "Agile Shanghai."
Comments