Up to the industrial revolution, guilds were common for craftsmen to preserve craftsmanship, quality, fair wages and solid markets. During the industrial revolution craftsman were replaced by workers and machines and guilds nearly died out, except for a few folklore guilds that survived.
As from the industrial revolution organizational performance improvement was only focused on increase productivity through smarter machines and by scientific management on processes. At the end of 19th century and beginning of the 20th century, it was not common for industrial companies to invests in education nor in fair rewards for their employees. After social troubles workers received better payments and as a side effect markets increased surprisingly. Successes with scientific management increased the distribution of management, and by adapting ideas of people like Max Weber, organizations became more and more bureaucratic organized ran by those professional managers. But what happened with the competency development of the skilled workforce?
Although increasing complexity of work and machines, knowledge workers like ICT-employees are still treated in a rather scientific management manner. If people do not perform as desired or if they are moved to a new position, they could (if lucky) get a training associated with their jobs. But next it is often up to them to improve their own performance.
It is a fact that high performance organizations put more emphasis on people and processes rather than on organizational structures and management power and influences.
Organizations that invest in people and their competences are far more successful, profitable and reliable to their customers than organizations that don’t. Those organizations possesses often comprehensive training plans, to train their staff on appropriate skills, knowledge and process abilities needed to fulfill their jobs.
Let’s get back to the guilds, isn’t it much more effective if a modern master craftsmen (experts) could mentor journeymen (intermediate employees) and those journeymen could educate apprentices (junior employees). It would be far more convenient and logical if crafts maintains their own competence standards than if this has to be done by an ignorant manager.
This practice of the guilds happens already within some professions where groups are gathering and establish their own competence standards. Examples are the Open Group with TOGAF for the ICT architects of PMI with PMP for project managers.
Why don’t organizations learn from these best practices from the past and reinvent the guild principles? It could be applied to all employees, including managers, for their competence development and professionalism.
I think the principles that the guilds used are still valid and can work. I've seen them applied in agile teams, when a team decides that they need to build op certain knowledge and skills, and they have a team member who has that knowledge.
BeantwoordenVerwijderenFor instance, one team that I was working with lacked testing knowledge. They had 1 tester, who was the only one who could pick up engineering tasks with test work. In a retrospective they concluded that this did not work, and they decided that other team members would pick up testing engineering tasks, and do them paired/coached with the team member with test skills. Several team members developed their testing skills, and after some increments they were able to pick up testing tasks. Occasionally they still paired with the test member, or with other collegues that had developed their testing skills, but hey, that's pairing which is a "normal" agile practice. But they went from apprentice to journeyman, in a couple of increments!
So yes, principles of the guilds can certainly be used, it is possible to use them in "newer" development methods like agile. So, what's stopping you to from doing it?
Looking from a broader perspective than only software development, I suggest to "decontextualize" (thanks to Bruce Springsteen for the new word)the working of the guilds and craftmanship. The idea of focusing on people and their processes and of people learning together in a learning organisation can be further elaborated. For example let's take a look at care for elderly people. Modern communication features could improve the value of life for them, but unfortunately they cannot use these tools. Reverse guildmethod would then be that youngsters learn these people how to use their I-phone to communicate without having to travel. Family contacts in new perspective. And wouldn't it be nice, if these same youngsters would talk to the elderly people about the past during a nice walk in the park? So that they learn history besides the book knowledge?
BeantwoordenVerwijderenIn the organisation consultancy world there is a movement of Rhineland organizing, where they created a foundation: Het Nieuwe Gilde (www.hetnieuwegilde.nl). Companies reinvented their crafts and do their business differently. So Ben, not every organisation is not using this ...
I think that learning from and with eachother fits perfectly in the teamwork related KPA's in P-CMM and I believe strongly that this was intended by Bill Curtis from the start.
Jelle makes an interesting point early on:
BeantwoordenVerwijderen"As from the industrial revolution organizational performance improvement was only focused on increase productivity through smarter machines and by scientific management on processes."
These techniques used to achieve improvements were very well fitting to an industrial production environment. The SPI movement and the CMMI's, inspired by TQM have tried to copy these techniques into software development. With some success, but also with lots of difficulties. I think these difficulties are mainly due to using the right techniques in the wrong environment. Development is fundamentally different from production.
Within development, craftsmanship is much more important than we have allowed ourselves to admit in the past years. Hopefully the tide is changing!