Agile Organizations and Conway's Law

In 1968, Melvin Conway wrote a profound paper which strikes at the heart of many of the challenges we in the Agile community experience in our organizations today. We try to introduce Agile methods and processes, but frequently find our corporate organizational structures are rigid and difficult to change. Transactional and contractual SLAs between departments turn simple requests into multi-week ordeals. Organizational flexibility and close collaboration across institutional boundaries are critical ingredients for success in any Agile system.

Recently I've been sharing Conway's Law with my co-workers to shed light on how organizational structure impacts the work our teams perform at every level. Once you see it, you can't un-see it at work in your own organization.

The following excerpt from Conway's paper summarizes the idea:

"The basic thesis of this article is that organizations which design systems (in the broad sense used here) are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations. We have seen that this fact has important implications for the management of system design. Primarily, we have found a criterion for the structuring of design organizations: a design effort should be organized according to the need for communication.

This criterion creates problems because the need to communicate at any time depends on the system concept in effect at that time. Because the design which occurs first is almost never the best possible, the prevailing system concept may need to change. Therefore, flexibility of organization is important to effective design.

Ways must be found to reward design managers for keeping their organizations lean and flexible. There is need for a philosophy of system design management which is not based on the assumption that adding manpower simply adds to productivity. The development of such a philosophy promises to unearth basic questions about value of resources and techniques of communication which will need to be answered before our system-building technology can proceed with confidence."

As an Agile Practitioner, I need to knock down communications barriers and increase my organizational flexibility, so that I can increase my team Agility and set my team and project up for success.