Processes Over Tools

The Eager Agile Coach persona states:

» Scrum's declared value of "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools" means that tools should not in any way influence how we collaborate; instead, agile is not about tools, and tools should support us whichever way we choose to collaborate «

Problem

Someone is trying to shoehorn an analogue business process into a digital collaboration tool in a way that's 100% loyal to the business process.

If this is performed without accepting that the digital collaboration tool chosen to support the business process comes with it's own discourse and context that need to be taken into account when considering how to support business processes with it, the adaptation will likely fail due to cumbersome workflows and a dreadful user experience.

Example Scenario

An imaginative organization has recently made two decisions: That an agile transformation is to take place, and that certain digital collaboration tools should be used to support the transformation.

A well-intentioned agile coach, who is proficient in agile methodologies, but who is at the same time very skeptical of digital collaboration tools, is influencing the transformation effort, trying to shoehorn concepts from analogue agile processes into the tool, without being open to understand the context and discourse of the tool and design a solution that takes this dimension into consideration.

By not embracing the context—that is, the values, paradigms, functionality and limitations—that come with the digital collaboration tool, the analogue process cannot be succesfully translated into the changed context, and the resulting digital representation of the analogue process will likely be more complex, somewhat counterintuitive, and problably won't offer a good user experience (UX).

Consequences

An adoption of a digital collaboration tool performed like described above can lead to the users of the tool feeling confused, demotivated, and even angry with the tool (and the processes it supports), because they have to suffer the work with the poor implemenation.

Perspectives and Alternatives

TBD

Solution Space

TBD