To Be Open or Not To Be Open: That is the Question
I’m in a quandary and I could use the help of other Agile consultants to think it through.
I have a personal statement that I use to guide my actions. Here it is:
“I’m committed to people experiencing joy, self-expression, partnership and accomplishment in their work”.
When I’m trying to decide what I’m going to work on and who I’m going to work with, that statement of purpose is the filter I use to help me determine the best way to proceed. The reason I got started with Agile is that I believe that work is dramatically better for people in organizations where Agile is practiced. I think Agile holds the possibility of transforming the nature of work.
Here’s the quandary. If I fully operate consistently with this commitment, I’d offer all of my material up for other consultants to use in their client engagement. Assuming I have something to offer, that would help the spread of Agile. On the other hand, I feel like I need something to distinguish myself. I’m new to the external consulting world and hardly anyone knows who I am (I was an internal Agile consultant previously). If I give out everything else for others to reuse, am I going to give up some specific value I might add that could lead to work?
There’s another part to the quandary. I know I’m a lot smarter when I’m thinking together with others, so the more I work by myself, the slower I go. Is this a case of the “rising tide lifting all boats”? Will aggressive, open sharing enable a more rapid pace of Agile deployment?
So what about Open Agile? Would it work to have a place where people could share and improve upon each other’s work? Who would put their materials there? Why would they? What virtuous cycles would cause this idea to grow? Alternatively, what cycles would cause this idea to simply die?
How about you? Would you contribute? If yes, under what conditions? What would keep you from contributing? Would you give your leading edge stuff, or only things that were pretty much common practice?
Your feedback would be very much appreciated.