Re-envision Agile: #7 Talk to the Managers

Intro

Earlier in this series we posted about the managers. (Here is the very first post in the series and here is that last post about managers .)

Let me make 3 quick points:

• In my opinion, some managers understand agile well and help a lot. Talk to them; get some encouragement
• The middle group of managers understands some, but we agile advocates should invest more time in talking with them (educating them)
• Some managers are probably never going to understand agile. And some of those can be quite harmful to an agile adoption or transformation. Something needs to be done, at some point

We agile advocates typically do not spend enough time with managers.

I won’t say how much time is enough (I guess that should vary), but my bias is, you are not spending enough time yet. Am I right?

Some examples

Some people want to blame everything on managers. It's all their fault.

This is not realistic or helpful. In fact, in many cases, just wrong.

First, agile advocates must take the responsibility to explain things.

Second, a lot of managers understand agile better than many agile advocates, as we implied earlier.

But, there is a lot of work we can do. Let's give some common examples.

Sticking to the old ways

A lot of managers want to stick to the old ways.

There is some logic to that.

Ex: Many companies have tried many new things, change initiatives with fancy titles. And with low results. So, many managers are cynical about change initiatives.

This doesn't mean these managers won't change. Just that they are skeptical of official change initiatives. We have to explain enough to convince them that it might work.

Over-Focus on immediate results

In general, it's admirable to focus and to focus on immediate results.

But it has two problems.

One, it commonly does not leave time to act on continuous improvement. Hard to change if you take no time to change.

Two, the focus on immediate results often means that the managers have the Team is bouncing from one goal to the next very quickly. Often too quickly. It can drive morale down.

What’s to like

Let’s change the focus to opportunities. Why should managers like agile?

I think there are many reasons, but let’s pick a few.

Transparency

Particularly with Scrum, any manager should see the productivity of the team much more clearly. What they can get done in 2 weeks (in the Sprint).

All managers like this, even if things don’t really improve. At least they can see better how well (or how badly) things are going.

Whatever success the Team has had, or problems they have endured, the people in the Team who are mainly responsible. It is easy to see what to address .(Note: I dis not mean to suggest that most problems are people-problems). (Cf. Deming on that. 80-90% are "system" problems.)

Morale

A lot of the success of any real team of knowledge workers is due to their relative morale. The higher, the better.

It should be clear that IF the Team understands better why they are doing this product or project, IF they are having some fun, and IF the stress is less, they will likely be more productive.

The morale will be higher. As suggested before, productivity, if not clearly up, is at least pretty good and fairly steady. Again, our hypothesis, is that if morale or motivation is up, then, other things equal, productivity will be up also.

Feedback

The business side (or possibly even the customers) can see what is done-done so far, and give the Team feedback. Any problems can be fixed immediately. So that, at least according to the business side, we have built stuff (and are more likely to be building stuff) that customers want. We have not built only what technologists thought the customers wanted.

I am not suggesting this is perfect, but it is a lot better, and managers can understand that.

Line of sight to completion

With a little experience, both the Team and the Manager have a better view into how much of the work has been completed, and when the release can be delivered. Not perfectly, just much better than what we had before. We can see the working product done-done so far. The remaining stories and their estimates are better and smaller and clearer.

Managers like this.

Continuous Improvement

Scrum has helped them build a sprint cycle of continuous improvement. The manager can see that, and the results from that. Such as maybe a 2% to 5% improvement in Velocity each sprint on average. The current biggest impediment is clearer to the Team (and the Manager). If the Manager wanted to help the Team, he or she would be more confident that the top impediment would likely be the best place to start. This is far better than the "where do I even start" feeling that managers often have.

This reassures the manager that the Team and the manager can control things more, rather than being at the mercy of unseen events.

Again, managers like this.

Conclusion

There is a lot for managers to like in agile-scrum. We listed a few.

Talk to managers about these ideas. See if they don’t at least like the ideas. See if you can get them to see each idea in action with your Team.

It should improve your scrum implementation (for the Team or for a bigger group).