Can People Oriented Companies replace traditional Companies?

Agile is a shifting paradigm moving from a formal value to more informal and human values emerging the power of a company as a group of people that collaborate and delivers following some common sense rules.

I'm just back from another Scrum training session happy to understanding a new lesson learned. I'm reporting here what the training's participants deducted from Scrum and Agile generally.

One of the main concept in Scrum is the Team: Team is the one that is responsible to make plans, to organize the sprint and to deliver something potentially shippable at the end of the Sprint. A team directly work with the Customer - in scrum called Product Owner - that knows what is has to be implemented first because knowing its ROI. A customer can prioritize features, remove impediments, and make the team's life smooth. The combination of a self-organizing team and the customer is the main benefit; no more people should be stacked between them.
Nor project manager too. The unique facility is a facilitator - the scrum master - that is one who is responsible to making things happen.

A company is a group of people instead of some processes and archetypes that formally keep things consistently.

How do values are shifting from a formal and bureaucratic Corporate to an efficient Company?

In a standard company, typically people feel frustrated, living every day as a personal milestone with the focus of careers and then money. Careers involve a mindset strictly focused on some problems, increasing specialization and competition between colleagues. The competition brings up jealousy between person and jealousy outline irresponsibility: "if she's better than I and I'm jealous, I'm not responsible of it!" Inside a vortex like this where people work independently, customers suffer that everything should be planned with a contingency in mind, thus generating extra cost. If the contingency is not enough to survive a crash, a backup plan is provided as a wonderful tool to save the bread crumbs of the project.


In a different company, people work together sharing the "you as a team" statement. This creates a group responsibility where all the active members share the same objective and work in the same direction. People should be honest and had transparent conversation each other. For the corporate this let everyone knowing the other avoiding specialization and promoting a distributed knowledge where there are people who know better a topic (the old specialized) and other less. This maintains a sense of being the corporate with a clear mission. The opportunity to discuss freely without risk, move a relation with the customer from a contingency oriented approach to an early knowledge of what is going on: day by day. Backup plans are not need because knowing that the future is full of interesting problems, the first things to be implemented are the most important in term of return of investment.

I'd like to thank Giovanni (1-2), Gaetano and Serena for the comparison between the two models and formalization of this during my training in Florence. The things I'm mentioning is what happening in some company I'm introducing Scrum and Agile generally.