I stumbled on a Wikipedia-article about Adhocracy today, and it made me think about software development methods and software development organizations.
Here are my thoughts…
Heavy-weight development processes strive for being more and more formal and thereby (intentionally or unintentionally) turning the organization into a bureaucracy.
Whereas light-weight development methods seem to strive for the opposite i.e., striving for a more adhocratic organization.
If this sounds reasonable, it might also seem reasonable that many organizations once have started as an adhocracy (start-up company), then moved more towards being a bureaucracy (expanding, need process and method), to finally find out that they really want to get back to where they came from (creative environment).
Not that I would ever think that you need to go through the bureaucracy to realize that you don’t want to be there; it seems more like the bureaucratic approach happens because the “industry standard” tells you that you need to go there.
So, because I nowadays see myself more as an Adhocrat than a Bureaucrat, I will try to encourage you to not go through the heavy-weight processes in order to realize that all you wanted was to get rid of them.
And I do hope that my children won’t have to experience the bureaucracy before the adhocracy when they one day decide to become software testers like their beloved father.