Spent some time today puzzling over assumptions about flexibility of people management in modern organisations.
Hypothesis: pre-agile professional service organisations developed resource pools exogenous to projects because the projects themselves lacked agility
In contrast, agile teams have endogenous flexibility: you get to keep a high-performing team together but let its scope shift in response to changing needs
Old assumptions about the fungibility of "human resources", necessary for exogenous flexibility, will rapidly undermine endogenous flexibility when applied to agile delivery
Plain English version: instead of managers moving people to the work, invest in teams that seek out and deliver greatest value