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Ever since Toy Story was released in 1995, Pixar has never ceased to amaze us. The average international gross per Pixar film is more than $550 million, and the studio has collected 24 Academy Awards. So what makes Pixar so successful? According to a recent article by Wired Magazine, it is a combination of Pixar’s courage to charter into unknown territories, their discipline and attention to detail, and a long-lasting symbiotic relationship between the management and the creative talent.

Although not officially Agile, Pixar’s entire process is empirical and employs an iterative and incremental approach to foster creativity, optimize predictability and control risk. Filmmakers meet every day to analyze the few seconds of film animated the day before and to gather feedback from the senior creative staff. Similarly, Agile software teams use Daily Standup Meetings to improve communication, identify and remove impediments to development, highlight and promote quick decision-making, and update the entire team on a project’s progress.

Pixar also realizes that mistakes are essential to long-term success. As Lee Unkrich, director of Toy Story 3, says, “We know screw-ups are an essential part of making something good. That’s why our goal is to screw up as fast as possible.” The very architecture of Agile ensures that projects fail early on so that teams can correct any errors before a lot of time and money have been invested. It also provides stakeholders with multiple opportunities to decide whether a project will succeed in the long-term or if it’s more strategic to go in a different direction.

Core to Pixar’s essence is its belief that just because something hasn’t been done before doesn’t mean that it cannot be done. Pixar does not just make films that perform better than the standard fare. It makes its films differently. Leveraging the practices of inspect and adapt, Agile teams also focus on addressing the unknown and unearthing what it is that customers actually value. They strive to deliver products that are outstanding in usability, quality and elegance by optimizing the development process (i.e., reducing waste, solving existing problems and relying on the collective wisdom of the team).

Contrary to the popular practice of assembling a cast of freelance professionals to work on a single project and then dismantling the team when the project is over, Pixar realized early on that creating new teams for each project prevents filmmakers from ever really learning how to work effectively together. Also, hiring talent on a short-term basis does not inspire loyalty to the project or even trust in fellow team members. Pixar rocked the boat by hiring its talent long-term to work on projects across the studio, as well as involving people from different disciplines to solve problems collaboratively. This practice is similar to creating cross-functional software development teams, as advised by Agile methods.  The resulting synergy improves the entire team’s overall efficiency and effectiveness.

If we are to learn from Pixar’s success, we need to challenge the status quo, encourage long-term relationships, and create a work environment where everyone feels they are part of something extraordinary. As software developers, we can follow this same roadmap by adopting Agile principles of building long-term teams, constantly communicating, freely expressing ideas and catching errors early in the cycle. With strong team values and a fluid development process, there’s no reason we as software developers can’t be as creative and successful as Pixar Animation Studio.

Sources:

Animating a Blockbuster: How Pixar Built Toy Story 3
Jonah Lehrer
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/05/process_pixar/

How Pixar Fosters Collective Creativity
Ed Catmull
http://hbr.org/2008/09/how-pixar-fosters-collective-creativity/ar/1

The Pixar Story
Leslie Iwerks Productions

This Post was an Agile collaboration between Peter Harrison & Mayank Gupta of GlobalLogic

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