An Agile IT Department?

The "Agile" craze hit a few years back, and it really was an excellent idea. While I was never formally exposed to any projects or development/design scenarios specific to the agile movement, I understood the basic premise. The adoption of short term easy to quantify goals as fast and as clear as possible. I've been reading up on it lately, and I really agree with the approach.

I think that we should have Agile IT Departments. I mean, it makes sense. I think too much responsibility and accountability has been centered on those in the managerial role. Managers in an IT department are often technical in nature, but have gotten to the point in their career where they have been "promoted" into management by sheer seniority/pay raises. They lose touch with the technical aspect of the field, but they are responsible for now managing a team of technical staff who are in touch with the field every day as part of their jobs. This presents us with two problems:

1. You have managers who are not as technical as their direct reports often interjecting outdated technical assumptions about projects (and, they are often clever or come up with scenarios that are hard to 100% answer), and
2. You have neutered technical staff members, accountable for as much as their manager gives them according to their own comfort level of that individual making them look good.

Therefore you have extremely protected technical folks, with unbelievably accountable managers. It's a bit lopsided. I think it comes down to trust.

More trust should be given to the technical person. This will in turn allow that person to execute in an Agile methodology. This person may see an immediate fix to a problem, however, through normal processes the red tape and bureaucracy of a corporate IT department may string it out - or, in some cases, shoot it down and ask for a more detailed analysis of a "root cause." That person needs to be able to implement a fix or an optimization as they see are qualified to perform.

I really think that if you've invested the time and money to hire someone to perform the job of a specific position, you need to give them the trust to perform that position. You need to give them accountability, and trust that the inputs you give them will produce a unique output according to that person's ability to solve the problem.

So, what happens now, then? You end up with half-assed implementations that are built on band-aids that these technical people sneak in because they can't go through the official process of implementing clear-as-day solutions to problems. If the IT Department was Agile, then these implementations would go in legitimately and quickly. It's like penalizing people for buying music with horrible DRM technology - people will download illegal versions of the music they bought just to be able to listen to it how they want.