Playing nice with others

You may have noticed, but I don't always like to play nice with others. Not that I'm a "My way or the Highway" type, I just have a lot of faith in my experiences and techniques. That and other people are generally stupid, but I digress.

The reality is that working with others is a job requirement, and often the most difficult part of the job. Working alone, while efficient, is not an option. I've had to spend the better part of the last two weeks working with the new test lead assigned to our project to bring all our work items in compliance with the theoretical work request process that the process gestapo has been wasting tons of money and time on working hard to implement. While this process has been in development for almost a year and continues to fail at providing anything useful, he (our tester) is being forced to work with it, so I need to be a good citizen and help him do his job. This is part of trying to build my consensus team and redirect what they're asking for into something more like what I require.

For a while I was trying to get everyone on the other side to start working within our tool (ExtremePlanner) since it satisfied all their purported requirements and alleviated the need for arduous status meetings. They unfortunately were unwilling because the request didn't come from on high. Also, I have to acknowledge that I failed to move quickly enough in pushing Agile deep into the organization. We now have yet another layer of project management bureaucracy being added which will require new navigation techniques. In my defense, I lacked the official capacity to effect change, so it has been an uphill battle. For future endeavors I plan on negotiating for more formal acknowledgment of this capacity and/or work to completely absorb as much of the testing/quality and product ownership groups into a tighter partnership with development. Having group separation leads to fiefdoms and infighting and makes drastic transition (which is what moving to Agility is) incredibly difficult. Too many interests seek to maintain the status quo of failed policies to allow broad, quick adoption. That or I need to identify an Agile champion to work with in these other teams.