Sunday, April 26, 2009
In order to adopt Agile, do you have to divest team members from their respective skills?
As enterprises start to experiment with introducing agile methods, skill sets are becoming blurred and people will over time receive less respect for their individual abilities...
Some developers are excellent at server-side technologies and optimization of heavy-weight data provisioning. Others have invested a large amount of their careers learning GUI technologies and have developed a fundamental understanding of users and usability in an application. Neither skill set is better than the other but they are certainly different.
While agile should encourage developers to learn new skills, many simply get better at becoming mediocre and never master another skill. If you have telecommuters involved, they will get even further blurred as managing remote workers is not a skill that many PMs have in their toolbelt and agile makes it more difficult. PMs can either bury resources where they give preferential treatment to those who manage face time or simply give those not in sight menial tasks that they don't have to track (aka busy work).
While I know that many will have a different perspective, I am curious to hear from those who had different experiences...
| | View blog reactionsSome developers are excellent at server-side technologies and optimization of heavy-weight data provisioning. Others have invested a large amount of their careers learning GUI technologies and have developed a fundamental understanding of users and usability in an application. Neither skill set is better than the other but they are certainly different.
While agile should encourage developers to learn new skills, many simply get better at becoming mediocre and never master another skill. If you have telecommuters involved, they will get even further blurred as managing remote workers is not a skill that many PMs have in their toolbelt and agile makes it more difficult. PMs can either bury resources where they give preferential treatment to those who manage face time or simply give those not in sight menial tasks that they don't have to track (aka busy work).
While I know that many will have a different perspective, I am curious to hear from those who had different experiences...
