I read this quote today and it reminded me of a few thoughts that I've been having lately:
No matter how much time you spend thinking about, focusing on, questioning the value of, and evaluating people, it won't be enough. People are the only thing that matters, and the only thing you should think about, because when that part is right, everything else works.
This ties in well to one of the values in the Agile Manifesto: 'Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.'
At TG, we've gone through a number of attempts at a work order system. Every attempt ends up slowly fading away as people stop using it. Common complaints are 'it's too clunky' or 'it's buggy' or 'it's too slow' or the grand-daddy of them all ' 'it doesn't fit the way I work'. I would agree with all of these complaints because I've made some of them myself.
In my mind, these systems were doomed to failure by one simple thing: the people using them were not engaged in solving the problem. Instead, they were simply cogs in the wheel that would be controlled by the system. Of course, software systems can't control people and that's why every work order system ultimately failed.
Can anybody say Cargo Cult' To me, this is a classic example of management assuming that they could create a system that would fix all of the problems because that's what worked somewhere else.
I'd be interested in seeing how we would approach work order tracking without software. What if we were forced to use a whiteboard to do this' How would our approach differ' I guarantee you that we'd spend more time thinking about it. Actually, that's not spent time ' that's invested time.