Agile killed manager ?!
I still hear a lot that managers are no longer needed since we live in the Agile era. This is not exactly true. Agile has significantly transformed the profession of management. Agile was designed to create products in a complex environment where business context and implementation technologies change rapidly. At the early stages when management was just establishing as the knowledge area and management practices only began to take shape, one manager could run a project and control its implementation. Nowadays, in the Agile world the approach would be called command-and-control, in the current quick-paced world such an approach is killer to creation of innovative products.
Agile has redefined how projects are run and has offered a new set of competencies a modern manager should possess:
- Delegation and distributed decision making. Now a manager has to ensure conditions where the team can be creative and be able to generate out-of-the box solutions and implement them.
- Good managers now seek strengths of the teams they work with and create a safe environment where bold and challenging ideas are welcome and appreciated.
- Obviously outstanding products emerge as the result of hard work of motivated teams, so people's motivation is another important aspect of a manager’s life.
- Developing teams and people. Agile has transformed managers into coaches, teachers, and mentors. Agile managers measure their success by the success of their teams.
- Agile has clearly explained that setting goals is way better than micromanagement and detailed definition of all possible requirements.
So, with all that said, has Agile killed management? What I clearly see that rigid, command-and-control managers are going extinct, those who want to be on the surface transform.
Deploying best practices and common sense to your IT projects
3 年True-true. On a very rare occasions a group of people form a self-organized team. And if it does, then in a closer look, you will find a leader in that group. More often there will be a couple fighting for leadership if none is set as a leader, what may cause turbulence that you don’t want in the dev team.
Organisational Alchemist & Youth Advocate
3 年I think that what you are describing sounds VERY close to the role that a real Scrum Master should play in a team. With the addition that by virtue of not being directly & formally responsible for people and project outcome, their intentions can be perceived as more genuine by all team members, which amplifies their potential impact. Most of the managers like the ones you describe are there because there are manager at higher level who believe in having single clear accountability. Sometimes there are additional reasons (for example previous composition of a company in case of Agile Transformation). There is a good case that can be made in favor of such manager to help with coordination at scale.
VP of Engineering at IDT / Build teams, lead technology, deliver products
3 年Nice story. This is exactly how we work in IDT. This is exactly how I work with my teams. Getting the right people on-board and helping/guiding them to move into the right direction, but do not micromanaging. This is the only way to work with A-team. Not all teams are there yet, some require more guidance than it should be, but we are getting there. Now, with B- and C- this does not alway work. Not all engeneers are able to work in turkey agile environment. Not all customers and executives have agile-ready mindset. So, classical top-down command-and-control managers are still in demand. But the trend, I believe, the declining. Management is about organising people. True agile enables a manager to work effectively with 20-30 engineers (3-5 teams) focusing on high-level delivery (instead of internal details), their productivity and growth. So, less managers are needed, but the qualification of the manager needs to be higher.
PMO | TPM | Autonomy | Robotics | SDV | SW | QA | HW | SIM | HITL | ASPICE | SDLC | SAFETY | Scaled Agile
3 年false 100%. based on my subjective expirience so far: managing and coordinating 6 distributed teams. however, only 1 team can be concidered as a true self-organized team... 1 out of 6 should tell u a lot about importance of peoples management activities of varied flavour