Coming Clean

In response to the following blog posts regarding management in Agile processes:

Managers Are Grown-ups, too

Can Managers Lead Agile Teams?

I absolutely agree with the premise that one of the reasons Agile works well (when it works) is because it allows the engineers to indiscreetly yet directly and intelligently control and mitigate a manager’s influence – what has failed to be recognized / admitted by the Agile community is that this just inevitably builds new ways (well, not really) to fail (e.g. all the Agile attempts that fail due to mismanagement because the engineers have no better management chops than their managers). It’s about time Agile communities started to address this problem of what really ought to happen to traditional managers and how to inspect, adapt, and improve on the managerial side of the house.

Many managers and management teams use Agile as an excuse to lose cognizance about the what, why, how, and who of the activity of their team. All they feel responsible for under Agile is knowing when things will be done and a summary of the what’s, who’s, and maybe why’s of development activity. This attitude seems to accompany a lack of interest and knowledge regarding the personal interests and motivations of team members and a disconnect with the fact that these concerns are central to their role – that, as managers, they need to be proactive in learning and discerning them.

From the articles, this doesn’t appear to be particularly uncommon in Agile. Either (1) organizations don’t adopt Agile because they see managerial circumvention as inevitable or (2) Agile fails because the necessary leadership doesn’t emerge as is suppose to happen and/or should already be present in existing management.

Either way, if a manager’s primary concern is not his employees and their satisfaction, he is doomed to failure. Employee satisfaction and budget/schedule do not have to be opposing forces. In fact, with a good balance that emphasizes that employees matter first while not excusing poor performance, a manager should find that he gets more bang for his buck out of his employees because they remain retained/loyal, interested, and self-motivated to perform and improve.

Agile is good at evoking these traits within engineers precisely because it puts engineers at the center of the concern of their work. Personally, I suspect the leading reason while Agile is all the rage these days is because older, more standard processes have become more about the bureaucratic machinations of human resources, schedules, man-power allocation, and budgets rather than keeping talented employees happy and involved beyond that of being mere cogs in the work that they are about.

Management is high-level mentoring. As a manager, you must invest yourself and your time in your people and their work; otherwise, your people won’t invest the best of themselves and their time in you and your work. For them, work will be just a timeout from their real life until they can find a better gig.

Generated in response to: http://www.mint.com/blog/trends/health-care-reform-impact/

Honestly, I don’t see how it can be viewed as fair if some tax burden is not placed on everyone to fund a universal health care option. While I understand that the wealthy have money to spare, such taxation is a punitive damage to their success on the part of the larger populace – i.e. it’s not encouraging the wealthy to continue in their success in America and/or to take it elsewhere. Likewise, when in American history have the people ever rewarded non-contribution as is being proposed here and now?! Maybe some think that such a view of fairness makes me a Republican – I hope there are other and more significant areas of debate that would define such a distinction.

There are three components that have significantly contributed to rising health care costs that are not being addressed by this new legislation:
1. Even if you have health care, it’s still an elective process. You have to choose to receive care; it can never be forced on you. Most Americans wait to see a doctor much too late, such that the cost of care resultant of undiagnosed conditions is significantly more expensive. This won’t change under the new plan.
2. Americans are unhealthy. We have a consumer culture built on unhealthy habits. Whether it be Wallstreet or McDonald’s, our culture has a premise of greedy consumption without thought to consequence. Short of using police and taxation policies to make people live healthier, general health is going to remain poor and care is going to remain high (unless this becomes a rationing criteria). Living habits between the USA and other high-income nations is stark in their contrast.
3. Americans are litigious. Health care providers deal with far too many frivolous law suits that stem mainly from complications that are more directly related to individuals not caring for themselves than any wrong doing on the part of the doctor. Given that there is no tort reform present in this legislation, that will not change, thus those costs will remain – and will likely begin to increase as new people are brought into a universal health care system.

The other thing I really don’t like about this legislation is that it places the government as the rationer of health care. The government decides what coverage a policy must have and, thus by extension, what procedures are available for you to elect. Granted, this is an improved situation for those people without health care, but for everyone else … well, it could be a bum deal and it places everyone at the mercy of the government (i.e. you can’t shop around anymore for the coverage you want). For all the valid concerns there have been raised about the loss of liberties the past 8 years, you would think this would give people – especially Democrats – more pause.

As to the numbers of who does not have health care, this article sites 1/3 of the population is uninsured or underinsured. The President the other day sited 45 million people are without insurance. I have heard it argued that he is including an estimated 12 million illegal immigrants (i.e. non-tax-paying individuals) in that figure. So depending on how you look at it, that’s roughly 10 to 15 percent of the US population without insurance. I still have not heard how many of those people have health care options they elect to not take (e.g. Waffle House employees). I don’t know what underinsured means, but with our public health system as it is, I imagine most Americans are pretty well covered, certainly by historic standards.

So, to me, it’s not about who has it or who doesn’t have it but how to drive down costs. Extending coverage to everyone that does not have insurance doesn’t seem like a plan to drive down costs. However, driving down costs under any system – private or public – opens up health care to more individuals as they can then afford it. It seems to me that this plan is treating the symptoms (not everyone can pay for health care) instead of the cause (costs are high, people are unhealthy)

The USA was founded on the principle that the populace’s then reigning government was too oppressive, and that people should be able to live largely free of government interference. It seems like we’re reversing course here by placing all our medical eggs into a government basket.