Why the “Method Wars” are Necessary (Sometimes)
Several posts recently have criticized the ‘methodology wars’ so many get caught up in, and attempted to shift the discussion to ‘leadership doesn’t care about methods, they just want results’.
And I’ll admit I’ve been guilty of getting caught up in some of the ‘wars’ myself, and I agree that leaders generally don’t care. I’ve yet to meet any leader that *really* knows, or cares, how the sausage is made. They just want the sausage on the plate.
And that’s fair, it’s not their job to understand every process. That’s what we as professionals are there for (define ‘professional’ as the person(s) delivering the outcomes, not a specific role).
And I’m not a fan of the black/white, right/wrong, Agile/Waterfall, all-or-nothing debates or positions. Successful delivery requires aspects of all methods.
Where I disagree with the *don’t argue, leadership doesn’t care* position is that, going back to ‘we as professionals’, we DO need to care, and understand what these are, what they mean, why they might or might not be useful and so on. Leadership doesn’t care – because they’re counting on us (delivery professionals) TO care, and to know better. We need to have the debates, and to understand the different models and approaches, because we’re the ones that are going to have to use them. When leadership hears about a new silver bullet, and decides ‘this is the one’, we need to understand what that is, what’s different about it, what it means for us in our current state, how it will (or won’t) work in our context.
When leadership comes and mandates using a waterfall approach for software development, or using Scrum to build a house, we as professionals need to understand what that means to our delivery prospects, why it will or won’t work (or what we can use), and be able to explain that to leadership.
They don’t know, and don’t want to, so we NEED to.
Again, I’m not a fan of arguing or debates where ‘supremacy’ is the goal (“this is the way”), but I do think there’s value in constructive debates/discussions with other professionals that you don’t agree with around the merits/drawbacks of different approaches. And also dispelling many of the misconceptions around many of these approaches and their intent or use cases (Agile is X, Waterfall is X, etc.)
Theory will never replace practice, and only in rare cases will it ‘guide’ practice. In most cases the most it can hope to do is ‘influence’ practice.
It takes a good understanding of both theory and practice to be determine if that influence is positive or negative.
*Originally pubished on LinkedIn