The role of Management in Disciplined Agile Value Stream (DAVS)
Claudia Alcelay
Product Manager, AI Infinity @ Project Management Institute | PMP?, PMI-ACP, CSPO?, SAFe 5
The first steps into agile were fresh air to me. As a team member, the sense of "freedom" you perceive when going through values and principles, through concepts like self-management or servant leadership makes the role of management somehow blurred. Not contextualizing agile in your organization weakens the role of managers and middle managers and when scaling agile, the process can be a nightmare. In the early stages, it is hard to see that the team needs decision-making guidance while being able to work autonomously.
Since management is one of the factors that directly affects the value stream, let's see what I am referring to as managerial decision-making guidance.
Managers help us understand that we are part of a system
System thinking is the basis to understand any approach to a company. If we simply manage people or even teams, we are losing the holistic perspective of an organization, the fact that there is a relation between its components, and that local optimization doesn't always deliver system-wide improvements. Systems thinking is more about the relationships between the components than the components themselves.
In this context, we basically spend too much time managing people and teams instead of managing value streams. If a value stream starts and ends with the customer why only focusing if teams are properly utilized, doing quality work... In DAVS managers have to expand their view to the entire enterprise and shift focus from utilization to throughput of value. (It helped me reading Goldratt's The Goal to understand the concept of "throughput").
This is how we normally manage our teams:
Below, it is how agile expands including the whole enterprise and beyond teams. This is how we create a value network, focusing on the work no the people doing the work, since as W.E: Deming said: “We trust the people; we don’t trust our system".:
Managers create engagement at all levels
Did you know that the business side of an organization takes for granted that all problems stem from the implementation and support side? The truth is that most times we work in silos and there is distrust in both directions. We need managers in the room who talk the same language as all participants (Joshua Barnes develops this idea in this webinar) .
The greatest asset for engagement in DAVS is the MBI (More about MBIs at this link ) :
As a value stream is the work and not the people doing it, visualizing MBIs helps us think in terms of systems, of flow. Since MBIs are the result of a strategic process they provide clarity of what to align around, which makes all the organization visualize and paddle in one direction.
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In this scenario, the intake queue represents the link between business and implementation and support. Managers are in charge of its development.
Managers make all the work visible and this has to do a lot with communication
All organizations have a hierarchy, we have PMOs, middle managers, CEOs... and communication channels are most times pretty defined.
Being a manager in a DAVS ecosystem, you develop an active listening to your organization, creating bridges for understanding the whole and feeling part of it.
Which are your thoughts about management in agile?
Thank you for your time!
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I help executives achieve superior financial, operational, organizational and human performance by adopting the power of Flow@Scale?.
3 年Great to see posts about management roles in the Agile space! Well done Claudia Alcelay!