From my own
knowledge/reading and being married to a health-care professional, I've come to
see many parallels that makes a discussion about how the field of medicine
tackles teamwork and how it is done in IT.
Parallel 1: Team Based Approach
Over the past
several years, health-care has become more of a team sport. Rather than having one individual tend to
patient needs, these responsibilities have been spread out to a team of
health-care professionals. This team is
meant to act as one, having to gain a shared mental model of the situation,
learn to work together while taking the lead from a central actor, and all have
specialist knowledge that needs to be surfaced at the right time.
To me, this is
essentially what an agile team has become.
Long ago are the days where a single developer/architect/person could
hold the complexity of a solution to themselves. We now have a clear distinction between
front-end and back-end developers. UX is
super important, and generally we have a specialist that deals only with that
area. Integration is a different beast
then standard storage options, and generally someone with competency in that
area is required. Not to mention other
areas such as security, performance, and testing. Even when those specialists don't exist,
someone has to play that role. In agile
teams, these roles are distributed within the team in a "best-fit"
format. Or short-straw, depending on how
your scrums go.
Parallel 2: Roles are sorta-clearly defined
in a dynamic way
From offices to the
emergency room, medical teams are created (sometimes on the fly) to attend to
patient needs. Generally in these teams,
there is a doctor who essentially is the lead.
They job is not only to be the lead, but also know the most. Of course we know that isn't possible, and
hence there are specialists that also make up the team. Depending on the situation there may be an
array of specialized nurses, technicians, or other disciplines. With recent developments in patient-centric
care, a lot of literature on the subject also includes the patient in the team
and defines roles and responsibilities for that individual.
This parallels quite
well with how agile works. Regardless of
the size of the agile team, there is generally a team lead or scrum master,
several team members with varying skill and specialty, the product owner and the
stakeholders. Agile is about a team lead
working closely with a product owner to deliver success in a project.
In both cases above,
the roles on the team shift depending on who is on the team and what skill sets
they bring in. For example, you may have
a technically weak scrum master who is great at communicating and keeping on
top of things. This person may share the
role of "lead" with that of a technical guru also on the team. The same can happen (although with less
frequency) in the medical world. In the
event of an emergency, what happens when there is no doctor there to lead the
charge? Somebody has to play that role.
Parallel 3: Teams form, disband, and re-form
with different configurations
At an almost
breathtaking pace, as compared to IT, medial teams form to deal with a specific
case and then re-form to deal with other cases.
This is essentially what happens in agile teams as they transition
between projects. The main difference
here is the speed at which this occurs in the medial arena.
While there are
probably more parallels that can be drawn, I think that it is safe to say that
there is a lot of overlap between how medical teams operate and how agile IT
teams operate. The medical community has
been trying to tackle these concepts for quite some time now. What interests me the most is the discussion
on competency.
