Crowds are very powerful. When many people organize and decide to do something good – very good things happen. When mindless crowds follow a smart leader, very bed things happen.
In this lecture we talked about wisdom of crowds.
The most appealing part for me is actually wisdom of small, professional teams.
In software development, and I’m a software developer right now, there are many methodologies, but the one that I can really relate to is Scrum.
Scrum is an agile methodology, which basically means that instead of rigid rules and requirements – the planning and development is done in small chunks (sprints).
But this is not why I mention it.
One of the nice things about Scrum is that it tries to be fun. And makes some of the most difficult decisions in project management to be fun.
In classic project management, the project manager asks the developers for time estimations and decides how long each task should take. Basically, PM is a single person who makes those decisions. Not FUN!
In Scrum, there is a game. It is called the Scrum Poker! The game is very simple:
Every developer has a set of cards with numbers, and each number represent a number of days. Product owner (this is the guy that represents the customer) describes a feature, this feature converted to tasks. This is when the game begins. For each task, each developer chooses a card that represents how many days he thinks this task can take, but he puts the card face down on the table. When everybody is ready, all cards flipped. If everybody had relatively the same numbers, the mean number is taken. If, on the other hand, one number is higher than the others, that developer explains why in his opinion the task may take longer. When done, the same game played for the same task (with the new information).
In my experience, this is an amazing way for planning the development timings. Not only these are more accurate, but it is also a much more involving experience for the developers. The developers are usually much more committed to the timelines that they have decided about.
Here is a video (as usual):
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