Chinese Business and Agile

In a review of Ming-Jer Chen's book Inside Chinese Business there are several concepts that stand out to me especially from the perspective of the Agile Scrum framework for software delivery (see www.mountaingoatsoftware.com for more information about Agile Scrum if you're not familiar with it). I am an Agile consultant, so exploring the similarities between the Chinese culture and Agile may provide some helpful insight to Agile done better. In today's post, I'll limit my discussion to the topic of Guanxi, a relationship based network approach.

Guanxi - a relationship based network

Guanxi is not just networking and connections, it's about a reciprocal relationship with a person which has mutual obligations (renquing) and is often supported by a sense of goodwill and personal affection (pg 46).

This relates directly to the relationship and face to face communication aspects of Agile Scrum. The team must build a strong relationship with one another, where there are mutual obligations for quality and assisting one another to ensure that the Sprint goals are achieved. It's also imperative that there is clear communication between the team and the Product Owner who is the customer representative. Since there is little formal documentation or process, the face to face relationship becomes the primary vehicle for communication and transfer of knowledge relating to delivery of value.

Another aspect of Scrum is transparency, where team members deal with actual time remaining (instead of percent complete), no buffering of task work, clear visibility between business, customer, and team goals, and many other things. The delivery team and process is extremely dependent on the partnerships that are created between them to ensure that the documentation/process-light approach of Agile remain effective and delivers real value.

The belief that adversity binds a group is also part of Guanxi and certainly part of a mature working Agile team. As the core team and extended team go through changes, hard choices, failures, and successes, they bind together more fervently and become more able to deal with challenges together.

As the team wants to work together, they also should consider their action and impacts on the rest of the organization, especially the customer or end user. The Agile team is very sensitive to it's quality (impacts to the system) both in the short and long term. The team doesn't want to build debt in the system or role relationships that make for difficultly later.

As with Chinese relationships where real trust based symbiosis is occurring, a mature Agile team will interact with their business counterparts and stakeholders, ensuring timely information exchange, compatibility between personalities, and capability to deliver work value.

The entire purpose of Agile as a framework or process is to provide a company with flexibility and capability to change as necessary. This is also part of the concept of Guanxi. Individuals must be flexible (even job descriptions blur) and use an informal approach based on simplicity which is valued above any other approach.

I thought about entitling this blog, the Confucian Practice of Agile, but that may be taking it a little too far. As we continue to explore some similarities between the Chinese mindset and the concepts of Agile Scrum, my hope is to see where there may be leverage to improve the agile experience.

Jason Dean
jason@AgileScrumPro.com
www.AgileScrumPro.com