Jane Byrne was Agile

If you want to understand what it means to truly know your user, look no further than the Blizzard of 1979 and the political career of Jane Byrne — Chicago's first and only female mayor.

I was not living in Chicago when Jane was mayor, but I have heard the Blizzard of '79 story more times than I can count from people who were. It is one of those pieces of Chicago lore that never gets old.

What Actually Happened

In January of 1979, Chicago was buried under record snowfall — nearly 90 inches for the entire season, the most ever recorded. The city was not prepared. Mayor Michael Bilandic's administration bungled the response badly. Plows were slow to deploy. The CTA — already overwhelmed — began bypassing stops in predominantly Black neighborhoods on the South and West sides in an attempt to speed up service downtown. Buses that normally took 30 minutes were taking hours. Residential streets sat unplowed for days. Garbage piled up. Schools closed. The city that famously works had stopped working entirely.

Bilandic went on television and told Chicagoans that snow removal was going well. Jane Byrne filmed a campaign commercial standing on a residential street surrounded by cars buried in four-foot snowdrifts, and simply asked: Is this the city that works?

On February 27, 1979 — primary day — the sun came out, the voters came out, and Bilandic was gone. Byrne pulled off one of the most stunning upsets in Chicago political history, defeating the entire Democratic machine on her way to becoming the first female mayor of a major American city. The event has been known ever since as "Bilandic's Blizzard."

The User Story That Changed Chicago

What Byrne understood — and what Bilandic never did — was the user story behind all of it. If I were to write it, it would go something like this:

As a Chicago commuter, I need to get to work so that I can do my job and provide for my family.

That story has an extremely high ROI. It always has. Snow removal in Chicago is not a nice-to-have. It is not a low-priority backlog item. It is the thing that connects people to their lives — their jobs, their schools, their doctors, their families. When it fails, everything fails. And when everything fails, voters remember.

Every Chicago mayor since 1979 has understood this. There is a very real paranoia — ever since that election — about snow and what it can do to the future of a politician in Chicago. When the snow comes, when the flakes start falling, politicians all over the city are running to catch them, just because they are afraid of what happened to Bilandic. That paranoia has made Chicago one of the best snow-cleared cities in the world. I would put our snow removal service up against any city's, anywhere.

The Agile Connection

We talk a lot in Agile about understanding user needs, about delivering value, about knowing what your stakeholders actually care about. Jane Byrne did not have a product backlog. But she understood her users completely — the commuters on the South Side waiting on a platform that the train was no longer stopping at, the elderly resident on the North Side with a car buried under four feet of snow, the parent who could not get their kid to school.

Bilandic had the title and the machine behind him. What he did not have was a working product. And in the end, that is all that mattered.

We have Jane Byrne to thank for making that lesson permanent. Thanks, Jane.

Popular posts from this blog

The Agilish Method

Combining Agile and Waterfall methodologies into a cohesive approach, we call "Agilish" can be an effective way to deal with individuals and organizatons that struggle with the natural fuzziness of the Agile approach. Agilish offers the flexibility of Agile while accommodating the structured planning of Waterfall. This hybrid approach can help ensure that projects are adaptable while still meeting deadlines effectively. Here are a few tips to successfully implement Agilish: Start with a Clear Vision : Define the end goal and major milestones upfront, much like in Waterfall. This provides a roadmap that guides the Agile sprints. Iterative Planning : Use Agile sprints for iterative development and planning. Regularly review and adjust plans based on progress and feedback. Strong Communication : Maintain open lines of communication between Agile teams and Waterfall stakeholders to ensure alignment and manage expectations. Flexible Prioritization : Allow for dynamic prioritizatio...
Read more

Agilish — Your Get Out of Jail Free Card

Image
We do not live in a perfect world. Most of our industry has spent the better part of two decades moving toward Agile adoption, and the case for it has never been stronger. But there are still plenty of clients, managers, and organizations that are comfortable with Waterfall — and either will not or cannot change. You can make your case. You can share the evidence. And sometimes, at the end of the day, you are still doing Waterfall. This Dilbert sums up the challenge better than I can: Pick Your Battles Dale Carnegie famously argued that you cannot win an argument . Even when you are right. Even when you have the data. The moment someone feels they are being argued into a corner, they dig in — and you have lost them, regardless of the facts. The same principle applies to how we work and the methods we use. Sometimes the smartest thing you can do is let the client or the manager be right. Not because they are, but because the relationship and the work matter more than winning...
Read more

Blind Alleys and the Case for Incremental Delivery

Image
A friend recently shared a fascinating article about a mistake made by some of the greatest scientific minds of the 19th century. For decades, the best mathematicians and astronomers in the world were convinced there was an undiscovered planet — named Vulcan — orbiting between Mercury and the Sun, hidden from view. The math seemed to demand it. The calculations were elegant. The theory was accepted as fact. There was no planet. A Star-Crossed 'Scientific Fact': The Story of Vulcan, Planet That Never Was Two lines from the article stuck with me. The first: "It's easy to forget that there are people behind the data and equations. And when people are involved, there is always room for human error." The second hit even harder: "In science, you don't dwell on the blind alleys... but the blind alleys are most of what science actually does. You have to go down the blind alley, you bang your head against that blank wall at the end of it, come b...
Read more