I the mistake of commenting on a Lean Development Group post about the differences between Heathrow's Terminal 5 and Beijing's Capital Airport Terminal.
I suggested that capital construction projects in totalitarian societies, remember the country is name People Republic of China, are not subject to all the "progress prevention" activities found in western governments.
The legal system for contracts is dramatically different, there are no unions, subcontracting is usually a draconian flow down, and critically important - getting people to do things on time and on schedule has much different dynamics in China than in the UK, US, or EU.
The respondents don't seem to acknowledge this. What disturbs me most is the assumption - conjecture actually - that everything that works in the software development world or their own paradigm, is applicable to other domains and contexts.
One other issue - a personal one for me in our domain - is that past performance and deep domain knowledge and experience is the prerequisite for being able to give advice others.
I'd had a similar encounter a year ago on the same forum and the same author talking about the construction of the 787 versus the A380 and the business strategy of Southwest Airline's point-to-point. Of course the fact that SW does 42% of their passengers taking multiple hops - this is called hub nd spoke. But those facts are irrelevant to the authors point.
I'm reminded of Daniel "Pat" Moynihan's quote:
Everyone is entitled to his opinion, but not his own facts.
So why do some Agile and Lean thought leaders hold the position that - Agile and Lean are applicable to every problem they encounter? It seems to more common the more prominent the speaker.
There are powerful advantages to an agile approach to software development. This is not in question. There are powerful advantages to a Lean approach to business processes. This has been known for some time. CMMI and Lean Six Sigma for example. The Lean Aerospace initiatives of MIT, which changed it's name to Lean Advancement (which seems to not have a functioning web site). Or my favorite The Lean Enterprise - A Management Philosophy at Lockheed Martin.
I wish these thought leaders would stop talking about how things that "could be or should be," and start writing about their actual experience in a case study they have personally participated in, and how those actual cases could be transferred to other domains and context. By this I mean actually doing the heavy lifting of translating those personal experiences into a real project in another domain, then "connecting the dots" between what worked in one domain and how those process can be applied to the new domain.
Past Performance in the specific domain and context in that doman are mandated for any government or large construction procurement.
But I've learned - the hard way again - that those who preach the gospel of agile or lean may not have the past performance another domains to support their claims of universality of their philosophies.
Like I said - It was my mistake.
