Those of us in the tech world understand that technical ability does not naturally translate into people skills, but anyone who has taken online psychology classes could tell you that. With so much technology at our disposal, we can communicate through text rather than through speech, network through social media sites rather than cocktail parties, and find out information about people through online services, such as Anywho’s reverse phone number finder, rather than simply asking.
These real-world communication shortcomings many times translate into software development problems, with a direct repercussion being that such projects often end in failure. According to one study, 37 percent of projects were successful in that they did not exceed their budget, go past their deadline, or disappoint their end users. Of the remaining projects 42 percent were completed but were problematic, and the 21 percent of remaining projects were complete failures. A similar study agreed with that last measure, concluding that one project fails for every five that are started.
All too often, the problems that delay and kill a project are not technical in nature or derived from a difficult coding situation. When challenges arise, rather, they are often times communication, leadership, and coordination inefficiencies among the various people involved – especially the project manager.
With traditional software development methods, especially Waterfall, most problems with the project could ultimately be traced back to the manager. Since Waterfall requires getting information and doing most planning at the project’s front end, tremendous responsibility rests with the manager to successfully and coordinate the development’s every step. Unfortunately, managers are often assigned to jobs because they are good software developers and have excellent technical skills. Once on the job, however, it becomes clear that those technical skills do not translate into an ability to organize, motivate, and coordinate a team of people. Project failure rates only rise as a result.
Newer development approaches put less of a burden on the manager, but require greater collaboration skills from all members of the team. Since Agile encourages feedback and team coordination at all levels of development, it requires a more flexible and team-oriented approach from every person who is involved. The manager still has the crucial task of promoting an appropriate workplace culture, but each team member is nonetheless needed to do his part, get along well with his co-workers, and maximize his group’s efficiency. From a coordination perspective, Agile’s emphasis on making quick decisions and focusing on the most viable pieces of a project can deliver tremendous benefits, so long as people problems don’t get in the way.
As a result, even though Agile is an improvement over waterfall in many areas, it still faces the same threat of failure if the managers do not lead a project correctly and if the people cannot work well together. There’s nothing wrong with having occasional software development failures – a company with no unsuccessful projects is probably not taking enough risks – but every failure, ideally, would be based on challenging technical issues. Reducing problems of collaboration is an important first step towards accomplishing this.
