Governance? Really?
I was just at a “DevJam” meeting where a bunch of project manager types discussed, mostly openly, about PMO. In this came the idea of “governance.”
From what I can tell, and discussing with the manager types, governance is a policy whether in writing or not that meters the relations or procedures of how work gets done. It may be nothing, like two developers agreeing to pair, or something more like a company mandating developers pair.
Of course discussion always goes around how far down governance should go, maybe even to the point of what type staples to use and sanity.
A few things struck me as a problem: the failure to identify PEOPLE as the important part of the process. For instance, a great presentation ended with “how do we capture our institutional knowledge and wisdom.” So mechanisms like blogs, social networking, wikis etc. were discussed. As I listened it became apparent that the real question was “since people are the wildcards of knowledge and wisdom, how can we remove them because they are the problem”?
Not a single person said: hire good people. As a solution. Not a one.
Another discussion revealed that a big company had just turned “agile” and had chosen TFS as a repository. Wow. I asked if the developers were involved — no they weren’t. Some big company hand shaking got them there. So now the’ve chosen their process and worse, TFS is a hindrance to going agile it just doesn’t integrate and provide the correct features to do agile well. I said something to the manager a bout this, nicely, I saw a face tick and their mistake?
Not a single person, not one, had talked to their people. Not a one. Who would live with this solution.
Along these lines was a brilliant point-out by a retail manager that “coders cooperate, managers compete.” And its true, mostly. At the higher levels competition is more cutthroat; but this happens in development as well. We tend to cooperate more though because a lot of us have the option of being consultants and removing ourselves from the rat race. It promotes cooperation. But I know the problem, at those higher levels.
People. Hire the right people.
Governance, PMO’s, “rewards” and BS figurehead leadership don’t make great products.
People do.