When working on my personal guide to running an Agile company, I have focused a lot on the company’s responsibilities towards its lifeblood: the individual developer. Yes, you know, that person who goes by many names, such as employee, worker, agent, cog, slave, or the one I dislike the most: asset. Calling someone an asset just makes me feel like your are planning to use the person as you would a tool, with no regard to who they are, what they think or what they want. This just seem wrong to me, so I prefer to use the term associate, which my integrated Leopard Dictionary defines as:

a partner or colleague in business or at work

That’s definitely how I want to look at the people working with and/or for me.

I have come to realize that while I have focused a lot on a company’s responsibility towards its associates, I have neglected to reflect over an associate’s responsibility towards the company. And by that I don’t mean the corporate company that’s only an abstract entity consisting of managers, blurry visions and broken promises. Resorting to my dictionary once more, I find three different definitions of the word company:

  1. a commercial business
  2. the fact or condition of being with another or others, especially in a way that provides friendship and enjoyment
  3. a number of individuals gathered together, especially for a particular purpose

While number one is of course a key aspect of any game studio, I myself personally lean more towards number three being the thing to focus on, and hope that number two will come naturally when you put awesome people together in the same room.

Anyhow, this week I have begun reflecting on all of the above and am now going to add a new section to the part of my “manifest” focusing on the individuals. For this section I will look at what I would expect of any reasonably awesome person come to work in my dream Agile environment. I already have a number of ideas that I want to delve into, if only I can maintain any sort of focus on this for the near future.

My focus has been steadily waning since the first week I allowed chance to set my focus, since I am now into my fourth week on what was supposed to be a weekly focus. I have not yet decided on how I am supposed to go about my other focus areas, perhaps I will shift to another area next week. Who knows!