Agile Managers: The Essence of Leadership
As organizations have transitioned to agile projects and programs, what happens to the managers? Do we need managers any more? Yes, we need managers. And, in an agile organization, where the managers are freed from the day-to-day tactical project tasks, we need them more than ever as leaders doing strategic work: managing the project portfolio, removing organizational obstacles, building trusting relationships with technical staff, coaching, providing feedback, assisting with career development, leading the hiring decisions and process, and building the capacity of the organization.
Managers decide on the strategically important work. Without those decisions, managers create management debt. Managers can use iterations to make those difficult decisions without creating debt.
Management is not separate from leadership. When transitioning to agile, managers must recognize and remove the systemic obstacles, such as individual reviews and the facilities people dictating how the teams must sit.
Agile managers become team champions and build trusting relationships with the team through one-on-ones, feedback and meta-feedback, coaching and meta-coaching, and career development. That means managers become generalizing specialists–specialists in high tech management, not development or testing management.
Agile managers assess and help build organizational capacity by removing system obstacles and recognizing that team velocity is personal.
Agile managers lead the hiring work. And the team always makes the final decision by consensus.
About Johanna Rothman
Johanna Rothman, known as the “Pragmatic Manager,” offers frank advice for your tough problems. She helps leaders and teams learn to see simple and reasonable things that might work. Equipped with that knowledge, they can decide how to adapt their product development.
With her trademark practicality and humor, Johanna is the author of 18 books about many aspects of product development. She’s written these books:
- Project Lifecycles: How to Reduce Risks, Release Successful Products, and Increase Agility
- Become a Successful Independent Consultant
- Free Your Inner Nonfiction Writer
- Modern Management Made Easy series: Practical Ways to Manage Yourself; Practical Ways to Lead and Serve (Manage) Others; Practical Ways to Lead an Innovative Organization
- Write a Conference Proposal the Conference Wants and Accepts
- From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams (with Mark Kilby)
- Create Your Successful Agile Project: Collaborate, Measure, Estimate, Deliver
- Agile and Lean Program Management: Scaling Collaboration Across the Organization
- Manage Your Project Portfolio: Increase Your Capacity and Finish More Projects, 2nd edition
- Project Portfolio Tips: Twelve Ideas for Focusing on the Work You Need to Start & Finish
- Diving for Hidden Treasures: Finding the Value in Your Project Portfolio (with Jutta Eckstein)
- Predicting the Unpredictable: Pragmatic Approaches to Estimating Project Schedule or Cost
- Manage Your Job Search
- Hiring Geeks That Fit
- The 2008 Jolt Productivity award-winning Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management
- Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management (with Esther Derby)
In addition to articles and columns on various sites, Johanna writes the Managing Product Development blog on her website, jrothman.com, as well as a personal blog on createadaptablelife.com.
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