Management in Agile

2 minute read

Why Agile

There are many benefits that many organizations witness when they move into agile way of working - and here are some:

  1. Less waiting time
  2. Frequent delivery (Note: You need to invest in automated tests)
  3. More feedback

Management in Agile

No manager dislikes when the team wants to take responsibility.

There are some broad misleading for the role of the Manager. The best misconception about hiring a Manager is well described in this children book from Hawtch-Hawtcher Bee Watcher in Dr Seuss characters.

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Taylorism said

No question that cost of production is lowered by separating the work of planning and the brain work as much as possible from the manual labour

This might be true back in industry age, but no longer applicable in today knowledge industry.

The role of Manager in today industry is becoming like a Teacher. He teaches the team, but allows the team to decides how to work. The manager builds capability to build a better and efficient team.

For example, the manager often does

  1. avoiding Taylorism
  2. giving space & opportunity to people to make own decision
  3. observing how things are going without giving directions
  4. making way too the team to do their best
  5. remove impediment from a team (eg. when the team asks if they can buy a book, instead of thinking the cost or worries about how people will spend money on buying what kind of books, remove the need for permission and see what happened.)

What motivates people?

When we know carrot-stick approach doesn’t work anymore, what motivates people?

https://youtu.be/1SfmmuC9IWs

  1. Autonomy - people want to make decision
  2. Mastery - people want to get better at stuffs
  3. Purpose - people need a purpose

Theory X - Theory Y

Theory X: Average human dislike work. Theory Y: Average people are excited to work. In agile self-managing team, we encourage more towards Theory Y.

Summary

The role of the manager changes significantly for most organisations that are adopting Scrum. Traditionally managers are often involved in deciding what the actual work is and involved in deciding how to do it.

The decision of what the team is working on is not anymore within the control of the manager but instead is decided by the Product Owner. The manager has no role to play in this and should resist doing so.

The role of middle management is to see the whole and build the capability of the organization to build great products.

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