Label activities, not people

Ideally, an XP team consists of all talented and experienced people. Every person is assumed to have good communication skills, technical skills, ability to analyze and synthesize, understanding of business drivers, ability to make trade-offs based on business constraints and the ability to work as part of a team. Indeed, there probably are thousands of people who qualify on all these counts scattered around the world. But IT is a pervasive beast. It touches almost every aspect of modern business. IT is also labor intensive. The demand for really good people outstrips supply by a factor of hundred if not more.  IT vendors who practice XP are therefore forced to move away from the ideal of more or less homogeneous poly-skilled teams.

Instead, we hire people who have a subset of the above skills and assign them to specific roles in a team. So we have roles like developer, analyst, QA, manager, UX dude/dudette etc. It is essential to recognize that this arrangement is a departure from the ideal - a compromise driven by market reality. How we look at roles depends on our model of the ideal world. If you agree with the XP ideal, then roles are labels attached to the activities on a project. e.g. performance tuning activity needs developer role, activity of scope negotiation needs manager role.

But all too often, we lose sight of the ideal and think of roles as labels attached to the people on a project. e.g. person A is a manager, anything she says outside her labeled area of competency should be taken with a pinch of salt, person B is a developer, anything she says outside her labeled area of competency should be taken with a pinch of salt, and so on. We forget that the labeled area of competency is merely a mutual agreement at the time of recruitment. We end up discounting the credibility of people outside their labeled domains.

This kind of thinking also magnifies capacity constraints in a team. Say we have 4 people with label QA and 12 people with label developer on a team. What happens when stories start piling up in QA? We are less likely to see if some developers can add temporary capacity to QA. Oh no, that would never do. Developers can't test. They are not wired to test. Mass stereotyping sets in.

Soon people start buying into their labels. Developers refuse to test. If you can communicate well, you are suspect as a developer. Managers shy away from writing code, or (shudder) gaining even basic user level technical competence. They go about saying "I can't handle technology", as if it were a feather in their cap. We become more and more entrenched in the silos created by our labels. Truly ploy-skilled people get disheartened in the process. A person with a label of analyst may have a great aptitude for domain modeling. But her inputs may be sidelined by developers. After a while she either starts believing in her artificial limitations or she starts looking for another job where her skills are more broadly appreciated.

It is no good to call everyone consultant and then use a different labeling scheme when it comes to staffing projects. To the extent of their skills, people should get to play multiple roles within a single project. Oh, that complicates staffing. So? Should the tail wag the dog?

Organized religion came about partly as a result of our need for identity and self-worth. It is probably reassuring to say "I belong to this group" and then move on to thinking "My group is better than the other group". We may have outgrown traditional organized religion but we seem to be falling for newer versions.