Recently I have been talking to more and more people about the power of using the Agile/Scrum framework to manage multiple business functions and it struck me that a likely reason for this is that the nature of work is changing for many people and even entire organizations.  

There is a broad shift happening away from the information/knowledge economy (which arguably started decades ago) into the next great stage often referred to as the creative economy.  In this stage, business starts to look, and act more like art.  Furthermore, a company's strength is often less about the systems and processes that it runs on, but more about the people and creative capital within.  Take Balihoo or any start-up for that matter - In a start-up, treating the business as art is not only required, but also a source of competitive advantage in most cases.

As many more people and organizations move away from factory work, process's become harder to define and lock down.  And when I say factory I don't mean just the traditional assembly line version of a factory that most of us think of.  Seth Godin uses a broader term in his book Linchpin where he defined a factory as:

"... an organization that has it figured out, a place where people go to do what they are told and earn a paycheck" 

This definition goes well beyond assembly lines and encompasses white collar information organizations such as insurance companies, government departments, and even franchises with their systems and controls that drive continuity in their offering.

Of course, as business's mature, it is inevitable that parts of the organization will become a factory -  areas where the work is repeatable and comoditized.  That's not necessarily a bad thing, however more and more things in modern business cannot be 'systematized'.  This can be scary to many people that want to work in a job with a map to tell them what to do.   It can also be a thorn in the side of traditional process engineers who love to create process maps for everything.  What some fail to consider is that if a process can be mapped, it is likely that it can be copied and therefor starts a march down the path towards comoditization.

In the creative economy process engineers and the process's they create can actually reduce operational effectiveness when they attempt to systematize everything in the organization.  Six Sigma works great when trying to create lots and lots of high quality microchips, but it doesn't work as well in value-add service offerings.  Process engineers can fine tune accounting processes but it doesn't work as well when trying to create a musical.  Traditional process engineering is valuable but not when it is used like a hammer and every aspect of a business is a considered to be a factory/nail.

Another common example for almost any company: Most large organizations have ultra detailed software development life-cycles that continue to grow and bloat over time but with all that detail its amazing how few projects finish on time with happy customers.  Why?  Because software development is Art. 

However, in the software world, people have started to figure out that lighter process can actually generate more predicable results.  Agile and its children (Scrum/XP etc) are not processes in the traditional sense, but frameworks that can both provide structure as well as freedom for the art of software development.  At Balihoo we use Agile/Scrum to 'sculpt' our Local Marketing Software 'art', and as mentioned above, the Scrum framework can actually be used outside of the software world as a tool to help manage work in the creative economy more broadly. 

Unfortunately, some that I explain the framework to get frustrated with the lack of detailed direction, but that is exactly why it works!  It is a framework with very basic patters that support creativity, but also the need to produce maximum value for the customer in the shortest time possible. It does incorporate aspects of process engineering such as Lean, but only to provide general direction.

If you find that some or all of your business is more about people creating art than running a factory, traditional process engineering may not be the answer.  Agile/Scrum could be the process management framework for the creative economy.