Agile

HP’s early Agile garage rules

Andrew Binstock has an interesting post about the early days of Hewlett Packard. They had the following rules posted in their garage:

  • Believe you can change the world.
  • Work quickly, keep the tools unlocked, work whenever.
  • Know when to work alone and when to work together.
  • Share tools, ideas. Trust your colleagues.
  • No Politics. No bureaucracy. (These are ridiculous in a garage).
  • The customer defines a job well done.
  • Radical ideas are not bad ideas.
  • Invent different ways of working.
  • Make a contribution every day. If it doesn’t contribute, it doesn’t leave the garage.
  • Believe that together we can do anything.
  • Invent
  • Maybe because I have seen the agile manifesto many times and experienced how we can mess and blurry the rules, somehow this poster sounds fresh and pragmatic. I can even smell the garage.

    I stopped on “No Politics. No bureaucracy. (These are ridiculous in a garage).” and had to read it twice. To quote the five dysfunctions of a team: “Politics is when people choose their words and actions based on how they want others to react rather than based on what they really think”. I wish that could work outside of the garage.

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