Management by Baseball

He wasn't, however given the tribute he was due in general because he could be obstreperous and sometimes not effusive or reticent with the press, and the press, after all, determines a retiring manager's press coverage.

Specifically, though, no-one mentioned LaRussa's management techniques were one of the two bases of the Agile Development movement. It was ignored because the baseball press is pretty ignorant of contemporary software development models and the software development trade press is pretty ignorant of baseball managers (well, I think they're sometimes ignorant of the actualities of software development, too). Further, software development gurus tend to pretend the other, totally software-dev based source for Agile, the work of Tom DeMarco & Timothy Lister as summarised in their classic 1987 book Peopleware — Productive Projects and Teams wasn't a primary radix of Agile management.

But the time has come to explain his rôle in this business innovation, as he and co-author Rick Hummel explain in their recent book, One Last Strike: Fifty Years in Baseball, Ten and a Half Games Back, and One Final Championship Season. They don't address Agile Software Development directly, but if you read the (very cool) book, and then read the Agile Manifesto (it's not a Personifesto...all 17 signers were male), you'll see a direct path from the La Russa methods to the foundational management approaches of the Agile school. To remind you, the Agile Manifesto reads thusly:

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
  
  
• Working software over comprehensive documentation
  
  
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
  
  
• Responding to change over following a plan

The MANifesto also presented 12 Agile principles. They lifted two-thirds of those twelve directly from Baseball s.o.p.

Specifically, the eight are:

• Welcome changing requirements, even late in
  development. Agile processes harness change for
  the customer's competitive advantage.
  
• Business people and developers must work
  together daily throughout the project.
  
• Build projects around motivated individuals.
  Give them the environment and support they need,
  and trust them to get the job done.
  
• The most efficient and effective method of
  conveying information to and within a development
  team is face-to-face conversation.
  
• Agile processes promote sustainable development.
  The sponsors, developers, and users should be able
  to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.
  
• Continuous attention to technical excellence
  and good design enhances agility.
  
• The best architectures, requirements, and designs
  emerge from self-organizing teams.
  
• At regular intervals, the team reflects on how
  to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts
  its behavior accordingly.

The most advanced management techniques in industry are about three decades behind Baseball management. Smart management practitioners know they can blow away their competitors if they draw from Baseball, and the Agile MANifesto crew were clever enough to do this. I'm going to give you 17 examples in the coming weeks drawn from the La Russa book that will show you clearly how the Agile Manifesto dudes cloned La Russa's successes to sculpt their constellation of software development methods.