What is an Agile Manager? Everything what you need to know…
Hi guys, in this post I want to explain What is an Agile Manager. From my experience, middle managers are the ones that suffer more with an agile transition, let me explain what I mean. When agile is introduced at companies, there are typically three “layers” that are affected at the company: development teams, middle management and top management.
Development team is the first to be affected but their daily job do not change much. The way how they work will change radically but their daily tasks will be the same; they continue developing software to customers. I believe that with top management it´s the same. They must understand agile principles and their the implications, but as for development teams, their daily job will be the same. They will be focused on company´s strategy, not changing their daily tasks that much.
With the middle management, a lot of things change. All their daily work life changes and that´s why I believe that middle management is the part of the organisation that suffers the most. They get insecure because the scope of their work changes drastically. Let me give you a couple of examples; At one of the companies where I worked in the past, middle managers owned most of the technical decisions, they were responsible for team members´ assignments. QA managers were responsible to say if the product was good to be shipped or not and many other things typical from old “silos” companies. But, if everything changes, what is the new role of the middle manager? What are his new responsibilities? Let´s take a look…
What is an Agile Manager
Organisational Change Artist - he/she should be one of the persons guiding the organisation towards agile.
Boundary Keeper - reinforcing boundaries both within the team and between the team and the rest of the organisation.
Value Maximiser - one of the persons managing the portfolio of projects. He/she is like a product owner, but in a bigger scale, always asking what is the highest business value project in the organisation.
Lean Manager - will use lean thinking to improve organisational flow so that the value that teams deliver can be delivered without delay.
Organisational Impediment Remover - will navigate trough the organisation and remove all the impediments that are blocking teams to deliver value to customers.
Team Champion - will coach agile teams helping them to achieve fantastic results.
The previous definitions were taken from Lyssa Adkins and Michael Spayd workshop: “Coaching Agile Teams Workshop” and from their Scrum Alliance blog post. I want to add that most of the new roles do not come naturally, and they require a lot of training and education in Agile. However, I believe these are the new roles for agile managers. What do you think?
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Hello Luis,
Thank you for the post. It’s very precise with good explanation about the roles and responsibilities of an Agile Manager.
With Regards
G.S.Ravinarayanan
Luis,
It would be great if we can read more details about main characteristics (Team Champion, Value Maximiser,..) outline in your article?
Best
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Thank you :)
A very interesting post on new manager roles in emerging agile enterprises.
I was wondering what your thoughts were given the conflict in ideology between a manager’s traditional command and control role, based on legitimate, authoritarian power structures, and the new dynamic that agile expects where the team are onstead self-managing, driven by flat collaborative structures as well as expert and referent power. Can, in your experience, a role truly be both agile *and* managerial?
M
I believe you are right in most cases, but then this implies as well a great deal of change in the functional manager relationship with the team. This new relation should be not on different level, but at the same level. This is also visible from the description you made, because to me the description melts down multiple roles (scrum master, team leader ..) in one single position.
Can you be a bit more specific :) I did not get your point ;) Cheers.
The roles as you describe them may help give some “focus” to the different types of tasks that a Manager must perform. However, the truth is that an Agile Manager must be all of the above!
How can she do so? How can she help the teams perform?
There’s a very simple metaphor that describes the complexity of the manager’s role: The Manager as a Gardener who tends to the delicate social network that produces the actual products.
Check it out in my post here: http://randommanager.com/blogs/blog/7416506-why-coaching-another-contribution-to-the-modern-management-how-to
Nice post.
I like the different proposed roles and descriptions.
What maybe could be helpful would be some basic skills or requirements that each role needs to have, so that someone in a middle management position who feels “lost” has some kind of orientation.