Human Centred Design

If all we care about is optimising our ways of working, then the agile mindset would be no different from management-imposed changes that too often arise from Lean or from Capability Maturity Models. Human Centred Design is at the centre of agile thinking.

Teams have autonomy to organise their priorities and ways of working for themselves. Embodying this behaviour, a team seeks to maximise its collective “happiness” derived from doing the work.

The organisation defines and creates a culture - a set of values and behaviours - that seek to maximise the collective “happiness” of all the teams.

There is a lot of evidence that “happiness” at work is influenced by three key concepts:

Learn more about Mastery, Autonomy and Purpose

Mastery - the ability to demonstrate excellence at work, to share excellence and to acquire new skills from others

Autonomy - the ability to self-organise within the team and to work free from management interference

Purpose - understanding the clear link between the work performed by the team and value delivered to the organisation

Statistical Process Control

Agile teams should have a clear understanding of their progress through their work and of their capability to meet the goals they have committed to. This knowledge is central to teams remaining autonomous. As performance varies over time, teams review their performance data to understand the root causes of process variation. Causes of improved performance are reinforced; causes of degraded performance are eliminated. The iterative approach that agile teams typically use enables statistical process control because we have frequent repetition of engineering activities. We can gather a statistically significant volume of data related to our work performance.

There is no need for management interference in this optimisation of work. Agile teams embody the essence of statistical process control and improvement. Of course, this embodiment must be acquired by the team - it is a change in behaviours and values. Such changes are not simple or quick to achieve - but once acquired, new behaviours will frequently persist for the long term.

What About Lean?

As Larman and Vodde point out, the two pillars of the Toyota Production System are continuous improvement and respect for people. This contrasts with the frequently expressed emphasis on waste reduction and management tools. Both Agile and Lean are in danger of cargo cult approaches - doing not being. We recommend the page on the Less Works website that describes Lean thinking.

anAgileMind

Taken together, the ideas of Human Centred Design and Statistical Process Control combine to create a mindset that is adaptive and experimental in nature. A mindset that is independent and that is open to new concepts. A mindset that is resilient enough to learn from success and from failure. A mindset that is disciplined in its work and rigorous in delivering value to customers.

Most of all it is a human mindset. A mindset that is determined to do the best it can for all the people in our systems of work. Welcome to anAgileMind.