Detect and Eliminate Bureaucracy  by  Raja Bavani
Channel: ConfEngine
Date: 2015-05-26

One of the many great things about working in Agile teams is the lack of bureaucracy. Agility and bureaucracy do not and cannot coexist. In general, bureaucracy is a system of government in which most of the important decisions are made by state officials rather than by elected representatives.  

Management guru Gary Hamel says,

“Strategy gets set at the top. Power trickles down. Big leaders appoint little leaders. Individuals compete for promotion. Compensation correlates with rank. Tasks are assigned. Managers assess performance. Rules tightly circumscribe discretion. This is the recipe for “bureaucracy,” the 150-year old mashup of military command structures and industrial engineering that constitutes the operating system for virtually every large-scale organization on the planet. It is the unchallenged tenets of bureaucracy that disable our organizations—that make them inertial, incremental and uninspiring.”

In our context, bureaucracy is with reference to geographically distributed teams working together to run Agile projects. When there is bureaucracy in geographically distributed teams, you will find powerful forces setting the rules, defining practices and mandating criteria. And there will be several followers who are ready succumb to the pressure. When this happens one may witness specialized definitions, measurement criteria, and rituals that define the software lifecycle to be followed by distributed teams. Decision making will move up in the hierarchy. Teams will practice practices just for the sake of practicing. Many of the team members will eventually forget the purpose, essence and sprit of processes. That is a slippery slope! In geographically distributed teams – especially when multiple organizations and powerful leaders come together, it is very difficult and challenging to guard against bureaucracy.   When that happens, we cannot have true Agile enablement.

This session will present the ground realities seen in distributed Agile projects and techniques to overcome bureaucracy in geographically distributed teams.

Conference: http://2015.agileindia.org

More details: http://confengine.com/agile-india-2015/proposal/965

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