Throwing work at people or throwing people at work

Shuffling people around, moving them from project to project, pushing them into multitasking is one of those management errors we seem to be making all the time. The scary thing is that still a substantial part of the management population is convinced that this is the most optimal way to use scarce resources ("human resources", people are treated the way we treat machines, as if they were "mechanical", swapping in and out). We have tasks to do, well let's throw the right people at it, done.
In the agile mantra, we believe that throwing work at people - instead of throwing people at work - is a much more effective way of working. We learned the fundamental importance of team dynamics, the fact that it takes time to build and that the fastest way to make it vanish is to the frequently change the team composition by swapping in and out people.
The recipe is to define projects with a broad enough goal/mission (expected throughput time at least a couple of months), assign a dedicated team to it with people full time assigned to it (exceptions are allowed, but stick to exceptions). When new tasks/stories pop up, push them to the most appropriate team (task closest to the project goal/mission), and let it be handled as another requirement/story on their backlog. Don't micro manage, but ride the waves of team dynamics.

When the Wolves try to speak Sheep

My "agile" adventure started back in 1999 when I first read Kent Beck's "eXtreme Programming explained - embrace change". Those were the glory days of RUP and CMM ... process, process, process. Kent's story was - like Tom Demarco's "Peopleware" classic - about people, people, people and the craftmanship of software engineering.
But making the move from process-focus to people-focus in order to achieve hyper productivity in software development is a fundamental paradigm shift which is in our industry, not the natural next thing. When hitting the radar, the process and Command&Control guys laughed ... a couple of years later, they showed wrong.

Over the past 10 years, the agile wave hit the shores of many businesses and service companies (first in the US, later on in Europe and the rest of the world), and many organizations adapted to the agile slang. The wolves learned to speak Sheep, but they're still wolves. They preach "self-organizing-teams", but continue to micro manage and fill books with rules, roles and responsibilities. They preach "refine your plan as you go", but still expect detailed do-or-die gantt-charts with quality/scope/means/time all fixed and carved in stone. They preach no-big-design-up-front, but expect massive architectural diagrams in iteration 0. They preach trust, empowerment and engagement but manage by fear.

They speak the language but didn't make the paradigm shift, and I doubt that they will ever do as it's about embracing change and uncertainty, something most of us fear.

Nothing against wolves, as long as they speak Wolf.

Breaking the spell

The team I inherited has a bad reputation. They live in their own little world, don't see the big picture, there's always someone else to blame first ("them"), and nagging is like second nature. I recognize a bunch of losers when I see one, but this team is not. It's a talented and committed crew, hidden away in it's silo for years.
I'm committed to let this team break the spell. I'm questioning and challenging everything to blow the "that's the way it's always been"-dust out of our minds. As a wake-up call to not wait for the future but make our own future happen. Over the last couple of weeks I feel the energy is loading again with small sparks of new life. This morning, someone who was assigned to leave for another team asked me if he could stay ... we are moving! It's worth to stay on board! You can not imagine how it filled me with joy. Thank you team!