There is a tendency in some of agile communications to mix up self actualization of the staff with the stewardship responsibility for spending other peoples money. We must have staff working the project who want to work on the project. They need the right tools, training, facilities, support systems. They need good management. They may even need free lunches and foosball tables. But their goal is to produce value for those paying for their skills and services.
But the very core thing they need is the notion that they work in a business. That business has to make money for them to continue working there. The self actualization aspects of the project and business are funded by the revenue of the business.
On a proposal long ago, a Bix 6 accounting firm partner who was helping us write a large IT support service proposal for a government agency reminded all of us of a simple strategy - our customers have money and we want it.
Below is an invited talked a gave recently to a supplier of project management tools - Safran Norway. This talk used the case study of Rocky Flats Environmental Technology Site (RFETS), which is a politically correct term for one of the worst nuclear waste sites on the planet - at least until it was cleaned up and secured. Sellafield now holds that distinction. I was a manager of project managers there, working under the paradigm of Positive Deviance.
Here's the Point
When we take other people's money with the intent to return value to them in the form of a project's outcomes, we assume an implicit (although to should be explicit) obligation to do the work as best we can with the skills and experience we have. Unless explicitly stated in the contract we come to the work fully formed. This means we don't charge the customer to learn how we can work better together unless it is explicilty part of the engagement.
The
getting better as a team, as a process user (agile, CMMI, anything you want), is part of the
Wrap Rate. This means overhead, indirect costs, fringe benefits and the like. The customer assumes - rightly so - that they have hired a
fully formed team ready to produce the outcomes of the project with maximum efficiency, least cost, and best value delivered for their investment.
Remember that ROI post.
Looking after the care and feeding of the staff is an overhead function. Most managers charge to indirect rates for billable projects. Keeping the staff happy in the Dilbert sense is just part of the environment of the work place. A mandatory requirement for success. But one that the customer pays for indirectly.
But customer's - at least where I work - aren't buying happy staff. They are buying completed projects that fulfill the needed capabilities of their business needs.
So you need both. You need to know what DONE looks like in all the details shown in the presentation. And you need staff who can get the project DONE and do that work in a meanigful manner.
The book referenced in the presentation
Making the Impossible Possible shows how this was done at RFETS. The book appears to be written after the fact. The management processes flowed down from the senior leadership. My manager (a VP/CIO) reported to the President of the site ($7B contract) who set the tone for success as described in detail in the book.
Here's a summary of the book and the processes it described. This can be applied to any project in any domain.
So focus first on delivering value to the customer in exchange for money. Along with that one of the needed resources is a qualified, dedicated, capable staff. It is the role of management to enable that to happen. Then you'll have in increased chance of sucess. Without that it's a Dilbert carton and you should look for work somewhere else.
