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June 20, 2005
Lowest Common Denominator
There’s been a lot of talk in the blogs (I really dislike blogosphere) that “small is the new big”. 37signals loves it, of course. Scoble talks about it in Microsoft land.
Brought it up with my CIO this morning, and he even brought up the “old” concept of Extreme Programming. However, we came to a very quick agreement on why - if they’re so great - you don’t see these models implemented more: the prerequisite.
You have to start with a group of functional, motivated, communicating people who have very little ego in regards to a shared project. This includes the management, and the money - not just the core project team. The moment you throw in someone who is entrenched in his work flow, who is dogmatic about a given implementation or technology, who is in “coasting” mode, or who clams up every time something might possibly be construed as criticism (even constructive), then these hi-efficiency models grind themselves to pieces.
It’s like a hi-performance engine. To get those levels of performance, everything has to be tuned just so.
If you don’t meet those prerequisites, then it’s back to the more structured models - because the structure can help route around the damage of the low-performance parts.
Either that, or you swap out parts. But that’s another issue entirely.
Posted by jim at June 20, 2005 09:55 AM