Ying, Yang, and Project Management

January 16, 2009

Over on the Scrum Alliance website, I came across a great piece by Jann P. Thomas, called “Yin, Yang and Project Management” (http://www.scrumalliance.org/articles/114), which uses the yin-yang concept from Chinese philosophy to illustrate how fluid and dynamic authority and responsibility are within an agile or Scrum environment. As Thomas writes, yin and yang are defined by four laws:

  1. Yin and Yang are opposing. Yin and yang describe the polar effects of phenomena. For instance, winter and summer would be the yin and yang for the year.
  2. Yin and Yang are mutually rooted. They are complementary qualities that make up the whole phenomena, just as daylight and night together make up a single day.
  3. Yin and Yang mutually transform. That is, a change in one quality causes change in the other. For example, snow melting in the spring cause a rise in the river.
  4. Yin and Yang mutually wax and wane. There is a dynamic equilibrium between Yin and Yang; even as winter days grow shorter, the night grows longer.

She then goes to explain that agile values are based on a similar tension, in which one element of a binary dominates the other (waxing) and, over time, cedes dominance to its opposite (waning). Here are the four binaries she identifies, taken from the Agile Manifesto:

  • Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
  • Working software over comprehensive documentation
  • Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
  • Responding to change over following a plan

As you probably know, the authors of the Agile Manifesto explained that while both sets of terms in the above relationships were valuable to software development, but that the terms on the left were more important. Still, that doesn’t mean that the terms on the left are always more important or ever valued to the exclusion of the term on the right. Instead, there’s a relationship akin to yin and yang, in which the weighted importance of these terms fluctuate.

What I love about Thomas’ analogy is that it gets at the heart of what it means to be agile. Agility, in general, is an ability to react quickly and nimbly to conditions as they arise. To think of it another way, imagine software development is akin to an obstacle course and each of the above pairs of values as a pair of feet. When you run, you shift your weight to your left foot or your right—to stay balanced and to move in the desired direction. In software development, teams must lean into one side of the binary at times and its opposite at others. It’s a constant play between the two sides, in which what is valued most is constantly shifting to best suit the needs of the team. Where waterfall development demanded teams follow a rigid plan, Scrum acknowledges that flexibility is what allows teams to build the right products.

Share and Enjoy:
  • Digg
  • del.icio.us
  • Google Bookmarks
  • StumbleUpon
  • DZone
  • Technorati
  • Sphinn
  • Mixx
  • blinkbits
  • blogmarks
  • Blue Dot
  • Fark
  • Gwar
  • LinkedIn
  • Linkter
  • Ma.gnolia
  • MisterWong
  • Netvouz
  • Propeller
  • Spurl
  • YahooMyWeb

Written by admin · Filed Under Agile Project Management 

Comments

Got something to say?





Collabnet is a project success company specializing in the improvement of management and engineering practices for software development organizations.
Continue reading »

Agile Tools

The next generation of agile project management.
Continue reading »

Agile Training

Offering several training options on software process improvement. Our agile project management courses are designed to provide your organization with a foundation in the principles and skills necessary to benefit from Agile methods. Classes are offered both as public and private in-house sessions.
Continue reading »