The Mission of the Prosigliere

When you begin something, it is important to define your mission. It is difficult to get a team moving in a single direction without one, and it is impossible to know whether you are succeeding or not without some idea of where you were supposed to be headed. Missions galvanize teams, and give structure to effort. As prosiglieres, we summarize our approach with the motto: “Clear Eyes, Steady Hands, Right Advice”. However there is more to be said about just what our objectives are, and what it means to pursue these qualities. Read this post to find out what our mission is - for ourselves, our teams, and for this website.

We are producing this blog because we want to share our opinion about how to provide support to businesses, what kinds of teams best do so, and what kinds of people those teams must be assembled from.

Here is our tripartite mission:

What is the mission of a prosigliere?

An individual prosigliere is just one part of a multi-faceted cross-functional agile and adaptive team, dedicated to delivering value and having the courage and skills to do the right thing at the right time to further the business position of an organization.

A prosigliere adheres to a set of principles that make working in an effective agile team possible - something we will post about in the future in greater detail, but may be glimpsed in the Agile Manifesto that has emerged in the field of software engineering.

A prosigliere seeks to support organizational goals and to contribute value as part of these teams. In modern society, we can see it most clearly in software development (we certainly do in our day jobs, at Opreto), but we believe that there are applications for this approach in many different spheres of life.

What is the mission of a team (of prosiglieres)?

In agile software development, the art of the software prosiglio, the mission is to deliver consistent value to an organization for which a software product or service is part of their larger business context. The software may be just one mildly consequential part of a greater picture, or it may be critical to the proper functioning of the business’s true core focus, or it may even have become (gradually over time or suddenly) the key differentiator for the organization’s current and future business position.

Whatever the ultimate import of the software component, it is vital that an agile software development team’s output be cadenced and predictable in such a way that the organization may make its output part of its higher level planning cycles.

This is the true economic improvement that agile software development methodologies enacted over its antecedent command and control approaches in enterprise software development, and it is the fundamental mission for a team of prosiglieres (a prosiglio). By implementing processes and philosophies that shifted the burden of internal supply chain pressures from an individual to a team, agile software development, on one hand released individual developers and made their work lives bearable, and on the other it also unlocked a set of team-based workflows that sustainably answered the question of how to integrate a unit of predictable, reliable software production into a larger enterprise context, allowing for its predictive planning processes to function again and thus be relied upon.

What is the mission of prosiglieres.com?

Our mission is to cultivate the philosophy and practice of agile development, mostly in software but also in other domains. We seek to create community and conversation around the ideas and practices of agile development here.

Through this blog, and the conversations we wish to spark, we intend to explore the frontiers of how agile processes are implemented in the real world, as well as where they came from, and why they are so often the best way to achieve the software goals for organizations.

We wish to identify and investigate inspiring and provocative examples of agile development approaches, through interviews and reporting, as well as to explore this philosophical mindset through documentation of interesting real-world projects in software, hardware, and beyond.

We want to create a forum here, to debate and discuss, amongst a formed community, both the specifics as well as the abstract elements of agile development, with the express intention of creating a living corpus of best practice as a resource and set of supports for agile development practitioners and advocates.

And finally, we want to start projects to create usable and useful models for optimally composing agile teams, tools for determining the correct level of agile fluency to target for a team in a particular context, as well as creating resources to support agile advocates in effecting necessary systemic change in their organizations - things they can show to the decision makers in their org structures to kickstart the process of its investment in agile development processes.

We are deeply passionate about all of these ideas, and the philosophical pragmatism that underpins it - both in the context of software but also in its potential applications elsewhere. We look forward to engaging in the community and conversation that has already formed around it in software development, and to add the voices we collect here to the rising tide, and conversations across industries, about its broader impact.

Please join us in this journey, and subscribe to the prosiglieres.com feed for updates and to join the conversation.