On Dec 17, 2004, at 6:24 AM, Ron Jeffries wrote: > The individual knows better than her manager or some other "up > front" divider what she can and can't work on, what she is > interested in today, what she wants to learn about today, and so on. > Therefore I prefer to mix the people together and let them figure > out how to divide the work. > > Furthermore, this approach is mathematically preferable to dividing > the people ahead of time /in every case/. As soon as we divide the > resources applied to a single problem (writing this program), we > create dependencies. One group needs the work of another in order to
Having a manager assign people to roles (permanently) is dis-empowering to those people. It edges into what Jerry Weinberg has called the "Big Game" (the game to determine who gets to tell others what to do). On the other hand, sometimes people are not self-aware enough to realize they are not good at a task or activity. Their peers and/or manager (or coach if the team has one), need to help create that self-awareness, and/or encourage a person to do what they do well, instead. Joel, as head of his company, may be one of those Big Game people. There is a set of memes that holds that some people have the right to tell other people what to do. In the worst case, those memes are associated with bigotry, in other cases they are associated with legitimate "chain of command" (ala military protocol). -- C. Keith Ray <http://homepage.mac.com/keithray/blog/index.html> <http://homepage.mac.com/keithray/xpminifaq.html> <http://homepage.mac.com/keithray/resume2.html> To Post a message, send it to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To Unsubscribe, send a blank message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ad-free courtesy of objectmentor.com Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/extremeprogramming/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
