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Evolution of the Agile manager

Evolution of the Agile manager
How will the role of the manager change in an Agile organization?
This is a question that keeps every manager busy when they start their Agile journey.

The Pattern of an Agile Manager
A crucial part of an Agile transition is the mindset and acting of the manager.
Many managers have a hard time changing. Not because they don’t want to change, but mostly because the world around them isn’t ready for it.
Agile managers need teams to self-organize. Especially when it comes to operational, detailed, day to day activities. Daily, operational work is too complex to be involved in every detail.
However, self-organization doesn’t just happen overnight!
Agile managers need to create an environment where people\teams organize themselves. Traditional management roles will evolve into leadership roles.
The pattern below describes 5 stages. In every stage the manager changes behavior and lets go of an old behavior.
Each of the stages has a relation to the maturity-level of the Scrum team. An Agile manager cannot grow when the Scrum Master, Product Owner and Development Team are not growing along.

The Director
The Director wants to be in control. He has a highly directive management style and tells people what to do; sometimes, even how to do it. The Director compares a Scrum team with a factory or an execution-machine.
The organization is a top-down hierarchy. Plans are made at the top of the hierarchy. The Director makes sure that people below in the hierarchy (Product Owners included) focus on execution.
The Director gives people individual targets to ensure efficiency, quality and responsibility for the outcome.
Profit and shareholder happiness are the main measurement for progress. Teams commit to time, scope and budget to make sure plans are executed.
Directors in a transition to the next stage have difficulties, since:
The whole organization is so used to this management style that it is very hard to change it.
Targets are still efficiency\shareholder driven.
People in (Scrum) teams are not used to self-organise (although they might be open for it).
Teams aren’t stable enough to continuously learn and become self-organised.

The Influencer
Being a Director in a world with uncertainty and change is stressful. At some point he needs to delegate stuff to people he can trust. That’s the moment where Directors become Influencers. A Manager needs some maturity from the Scrum Masters, Product Owners and Development teams to make that shift.
The Influencer still has a need for control. He still makes the top-down plan and then tries to get buy-in on these plans.
Once he has buy-in, he delegates the less critical tasks. In this way the Influencer can focus on escalations and high important\long term decision making:
The Influencer delegates Planning execution to the Product Owner.
Product Owners have to provide frequent progress reports.
The Influencer imposes improvements on Scrum Masters by providing guidelines on processes and tools.
The Influencer ensures quality by setting up predefined standards for the teams.
He challenges teams to increase their velocity.
He adds extra resources if this is not possible.
As a result of delegating work, people will start to feel responsible for some of the work. The Influencer creates more room for self-organization, but people still struggle to get in control.

The Facilitator
When Scrum Masters succeed in building good teams, standards and responsibility grows. An Influencer needs this to feel comfortable enough to delegate more work and responsibilities. Influencers turn into Facilitators when this happens.
The focus of the Facilitator shifts from staying in control\ensuring compliancy towards keeping employees and customers happy.
The Facilitator takes strategic decisions, but leaves the details to consensus and mutual agreement:
Planning decisions are an agreement between Product Owners, stakeholders and himself.
Product Owners become the spokesmen to customers and stakeholders.
He tracks progress by frequently visiting Sprint Reviews.
In Sprint Reviews he participates as stakeholder or helps stakeholders to make the right decisions.
He provides the boundary conditions for teams to setup their own quality-practices.
He uses velocity as an indicator for fixing issues instead of enforcing it to the team.
The directive management style of the Facilitator management has changed into a supportive approach.
People feel responsible and in control. They now want full control over their work.

The Advisor
Once the Facilitator dares to let go of critical decision making he becomes an Advisor.
In this stage he only gives advice. Decisions are made by the people doing the work:
Scrum Masters decide on the processes, tools and improvements to be made.
The Advisor consults or helps the Scrum Master in solving difficult problems.
Product Owners decide on product planning & stakeholder management. The Advisor has no need to be in between.
Instead, he facilitates interaction between Product Owners, Stakeholders and Development Team.
Development Teams are responsible for quality and how they do their work (using the Definition of Done)
The Advisor facilitates the Development Team to get the resources for building high quality products.
There is a big overlap in the work of a Scrum Master and an Advisor. While the Scrum Master is focused on coaching the teams, Advisors coach the Scrum Masters and\or Product Owners.
Once in a while the Advisor inquires if decisions do not lead to issues. He is still responsible for budgeting, but leaves the decision making with the people doing the work.

The Servant Leader
Mature Scrum teams feel ownership for the full value chain. The Servant Leader feels safe enough to hand over full control to these teams. Instead, he has has a holarchical view on the organization, while teams continuously improve on their own level in the holarchy.
This is what real self-organization looks like:
Development team members are responsible for product quality.
The Servant Leader randomly samples if customers are satisfied with the quality.
Product Owners are responsible for budgets, profit and loss of their product.
Scrum Masters are responsible for continuous improvement of the team and the organization.
The Servant Leader facilitates entrepreneurship at every employee.
He makes sure everyone in the organization has focus on creating customer-value.
He focuses on capturing opportunities, solving problems and getting results.
The Servant Leader provides guidance, possibilities and resources for new\unexperienced people to grow as a professional.
The major responsibility of the Servant Leader is to prevent the environment from re-creating old paradigms. Employees need enough room for experimenting with the values in the Agile manifesto.

Tips for the Agile manager
Traditional managers have a hard time becoming Agile leaders since many organizations still run on old, top-down, directive paradigms.
A Servant Leader stands out by breaking through these political power-hierarchies.
A few tips if you are planning to walk this path yourself:

If you work in an organization that is still based on these old paradigms, make sure that you are supported by ‘someone above’.
It is often easier to become a Servant Leader in a small organization. If your organization grows, make sure that new employees also become Servant Leaders.
Focus on growing people….You can’t do this alone! You need Product Owners, Scrum Masters and Development Team members to grow with you.


SLACK AND THE AGILE MANAGER’S ROLE: BE THE SLACK
ANDREW FUQUA
JAN 18, 2017

In his book “Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency”, Tom DeMarco makes the point that you can’t be creative when you are overworked or overburdened. Stress kills innovation as does busyness. Little slack leads to little time to look around leads to little improvement. To be creative, your mind needs to feel free and unallocated, uncluttered even.

THANKFULLY, WE HAVE A SOLUTION.
We have more than one, in fact. Let me first tell you about the solution that this article is not about. You can introduce slack into your organization with regular slack time. There are numerous well known examples of companies that do things like Fed-Ex days, time set aside for self-directed work, not allocated to Prioritized Product Backlog Items. Dan Pink once endorsed this approach. In line with this, I like what Dan has to say about what motivates knowledge workers.

But there’s another solution to the lack of slack that we should entertain first. In fact, you are less likely to use FedEx days if you aren’t first doing the following. To introduce this I must first point out something that Scrum says about managers. Scrum doesn’t say a whole lot about managers, but it does say at least this: mangers must stop assigning tasks. Too bad that many managers get their power and sense of self-worth from this activity. Deciding how to get the work done in Scrum is left up to the self-organizing cross-functional team. The people who can best decide how the work should be done are those closest to the work.

Just to be clear, agile managers should not:
make assignments
hand out work
direct people or tell them what to do
make the hiring decision solo
SW architecture (in my opinion – debatable)
do work
be an individual contributor
be a hero

Well, gosh, then shat should a manager do? Well, I’ll tell ya. Manage more people. Step in when the team needs help (but not too quickly). Manage risks. Also, you are still an agent of the company, handling legal stuff, signing off on expenditures, etc.

But you could also do something else.

BE THE SLACK.
Move up to a higher level of value to the organization. Be the slack that has been wrung out of the team. Here are some specific suggestions:
Keep an eye on the system, looking for improvements.
Use A3 Problem Solving (A3 Thinking).
Understand the capacity of the team.
Protect the slack; protect capacity that is reserved for classes of work that require a short lead time.
Ensure cross-training is happening (not by making assignments, but making the team handle it).
Understand the dynamics of the organization.
Understand how value is created.
Protect the team from interference.
Make the organization effective; learn to look at it as a system.
Support the team.
Clear roadblocks.
Provide good facilities; fight the facilities police. (Better: Teach facilities how value is created and how better facilities helps create value.)
Provide ample computing infrastructure, sufficient build machines and test machines (People are far more expensive than VMs).
Use Derby’s 14 essential questions for managers or the book on this topic she is working on.
Read Deming and Goldratt.
Watch interpersonal interaction; Watch when one team member pulls back, withdraws in a brainstorm (for example)
Help the team hone their craft.
Encourage the team to learn TDD and BDD by making room for them to learn (time – remove the schedule pressure while they learn).
Think through policies, procedures and reward/review systems and improve them. (What messages do they send?)
Understand what motivates knowledge workers (see the previous reference to Pink); Let creating that kind of environment be an imperative.

I contend that we should focus on continuous improvement of process, of people’s skills and knowledge, with a strong focus on empowerment and self-organization. Work on open, honest feedback. You’ll have better results if you do all that and just completely scrap the individual annual review. I love quoting Drucker here: “The average person takes 6 months recovering from a performance review.”

Let me bring it back together by saying you can’t do a good job with this other higher value stuff if you are down in the weeds assigning tasks to people. Delegate more. In fact, delegate everything. Free yourself to be the ultimate in valuable slack.


Key Takeaways:
Why having a manager is key within an Agile work environment:
If you do not have one, improvement tends to get focused only on the team level and not the overall system
Teams function best within a high degree of bounded autonomy
What the manager’s role is:
The manager’s role is one of looking at the environment and trying to continuously improve it
“It’s not the manager’s job to get people to work hard; it’s to make it possible for people to work.”
The manager’s job is to enable the team to work, and then, to enhance their work environment
To make sure teams have enough contextual knowledge so they can make decent decisions on the front line of the organization
It’s important for the team to:
Bring systemic issues to the manager
Distinguish which decisions they can make without consulting the manager, which decisions they should make with a manager, and which decisions are entirely up to the manager
It is important for the manager to:
Pay attention to the system
Notice problems across the organization
Be supportive
Have conversations with the team on a periodic basis
Build in learning time and a learning budget so the team feels that learning is a part of their job, not in their free time
Challenges Esther has seen with managers within an organization:
Not all managers get along and it may take an effort to get them to all collaborate
When a business gets to a certain size, it becomes difficult to communicate across all the managers of different teams


Are You Asking the Right Questions?
What is working well now, that we can learn from?
What is valuable about the past that is worth preserving?
What do we want to /not/ change?
Who benefits from the way things are now?
Who will lose (status, identity, meaning, jobs…) based on the proposed new way?
How will this change disrupt the informal networks that are essential to getting work done?
How will this change ripple through the organization, touching the people and groups indirectly effected?
What holds the current pattern in place?
How can we dampen this change, if it goes the wrong direction?
What is the smallest thing we can do to learn more about this proposed course of action?
What subtle things might we discern that tell us this change is going in the right direction…or the wrong one?
What is the time frame in which we expect to notice the effects of our efforts?
How can we adjust our plans to get faster feedback?


When people talk about Agile, they often talk about the approach they are taking: Scrum, Kanban, Extreme Programming, SAFe, LeSS, DAD, Nexus, etc. These and the other frameworks and methodologies that could be considered to fall under the Agile umbrella are Systems of Delivery because they are techniques for delivering.

There’s often an assumption that if we adopt the System of Delivery, our organization will Transform to Agile. Sometimes this happens, but often, organizations need more than a System of Delivery. They need a way to go about helping their organization evolve into a state where it’s capable of realizing the benefits of the various Systems of Delivery. This journey from your current state, into a state that’s capable of fully leveraging the System of Delivery, may actually require a System of Transformation.


last updated august 2019