I’ve been cleaning up my own ancient professional writing and deciding where to keep things (if anywhere; I wrote a lot of junk). This blog post from 2009 is a handy bit of history predating the wider agile movement.
I’ve been reading Birth of the Chaordic Age for a month or two – it’s my breakfast table book, which means it gets read for about 15 minutes a day; a fast and focused reader could down it in a few days.
Neat stuff. Lots of interesting commentary on work and human interaction – none of that’s particularly new, but I like hearing it nonetheless. I also just plain like Hock. I would hang out on a tractor with him.
Today, though, I got to the bit about the creation of BASE 1 (the original BankAmericard authorization system). Wow.
You know as you practice it that agile work uses some pretty obvious principles of human interaction and getting work done, right? But it’s still pretty fantastic to read about NBI (later VISA*) having a task board and the equivalent of daily standups in… 1970? 1971?
Right around the time the term waterfall came into use to describe software creation. By the way, while it’s often cited that ‘waterfall’ was coined to describe a broken process, that’s only half true; the Winston Royce article does describe a broken process, but he doesn’t recommend changing the waterfall so much as creating little offshoots. I think this telling of history better supports my point, though, so I may be biased.
My point?
Like many people after (and probably many before – my parents both confirm that many military organizations use the people coordination & visibility stuff that people have come to associate with agility), Hock and his team did something pretty obvious that was also revolutionary. It’s a good story. I may write more reflecting on the philosophy he espouses later, too – but in the meantime, the history fascinates me.
Random extra factoid: VISA is a backronym, starting just as the word and later being labeled (recursively) Visa International Something Anothersomething.