Series: Agile Roles and Responsibilities Series

Many pundits preach that the agile organization will not have managers – that teams will self-manage and can carry out all responsibilities of traditional functional management. This includes HR responsibilities, major conflict disputes, etc. “The team is self-managing, which includes all management responsibilities,” or so I keep hearing. Call me a heretic, but I’ve never subscribed to the scalability of this model. For most large-scale (esp. global) organizations, this is not a reality. Not only are functional managers not going anywhere, but they are, in-fact, essential to an organization’s transformation to Agile practices. However, their roles will need to change. Whether they embrace or reject this change could mean the difference between success and failure going forward.

To highlight the differences, let’s lay out the major responsibilities of a traditional functional manager:

1. Handle HR functions (e.g., Hire and fire/lay off, harassment, physical violence, larger-scale verbal assaults, etc.)
2. Champion causes/break down barriers
3. Maintain standards (quality, technical, ethical ) across the different teams
4. Develop employees technical and other necessary skills
5. Create, manage and restructure cross-functional resources
6. Execute performance evaluations
7. Set up work processes (esp. for their team)
8. Break down and assign tasks
9. Project manage the team (usually with a gigantic Gantt chart and a weekly status meeting)
10. Be responsible for the team’s commitment and deliverables

(I’m sure I could have listed another 20 responsibilities but I tried to focus on the top 10. If you feel there are important responsibilities I didn’t cover and a through on whether an Agile manager will retain or relinquish them, please feel free to list them in the comments.)

So what in this list changes? That can be answered by the overarching mental model: The Agile management (as a whole)’s mission is: To do what needs to be done to create an innovative, flexible and continuously-improving environment that will allow teams and Product Owners to succeed. This means creating an organization that is capable of executing Product Backlog changes at any time (including at the 11th hour) as efficiently and with the highest quality possible.

To accomplish this, Agile Managers would still handle responsibilities 1 through 4 - traditional HR functions, develop employees, set up and maintain standards (optionally with the help of Agile technical leads) but will hand over the their project and process management responsibilities (given in steps 7-10) to the ScrumMasters (if practicing Scrum) and feature teams.

But why give up those traditional responsibilities of ownership, assignment and management of tasks? Several reasons come to mind (feel free to add to or contest these):

• Allows the team to own their commitment, and just as important, own it as a team
• Allows the team to focus on the greater iteration goals instead of just their individual tasks
• Empowers them to self-improving

Many managers are concerned this hand-off of responsibilities diminishes their role. I feel it is quite the opposite - that it focuses their role and elevates it to a more strategic level. Instead of being consumed by tasks that teams are perfectly capable of performing themselves (albeit, teams usually need help at first), Agile Managers will now work as a group to see which changes need to happen organizationally – those that we never saw before or saw but were too busy (or un-empowered) to do anything about. This change will let them focus on:

• Setting up and managing cross-functional teams
• Creating and managing needed infrastructure (e.g., testing platforms, continuous integration, etc.)*
• Break down organizational barriers, usually raised by ScrumMasters and teams through Daily Scrums and Retrospectives or similar events
• Create and manage technical standards across the organization (with the help of teams and technical leads)
• Creating, training and supporting change agents (e.g., ScrumMasters) within the organization

*Note: I don’t mean to imply that the managers code the infrastructure themselves (although, they are free to do so if they want). I just mean they will look at the largest gaps and create internal teams to work on them as needed.

Item 5 deals with the creation, allocation and evaluation as teams. The Agile Manager still own this responsibility but performs it very differently than they would have traditionally. They don’t design the organization by architecture, layer or component (e.g., the GUI team, OS team, driver team, database team, etc.) but rather by vertical features. Additionally, a set of Agile Line Managers should treat all resources reporting to them collectively as a pool of resources where teams can be “pulled” from, instead of individual resource ownership. This means that Agile Managers will collaboratively assemble the best teams for a group of features and not just have teams by virtue of reporting structure. (I will follow this up with a deeper post on this topic).

Last in the list is item 6, which, like item 4, is also a transformed activity owned by managers. Managers are still responsible to perform evaluations but they will do this based primarily on the team’s performance rather than an individual. It is also a great practice to do this as a team of managers, instead of individual evaluations. (We’ll debate the right performance measures as well as the idea of abolishing performance reviews on another post).

Finally, it is up to the managers as a whole to set the culture to continuously improve and continuously experiment to do so. An Agile manager’s motto should be “It’s OK to Fail”, as long as we do it fast and learn from it toward the right goal. They know that the phrase “I don’t know” is a much better phrase than an uncertain answer based in no data or reality given because one is expected.

The fact is that Managers make or block Agile transformations. There is a lot of talk of top-down leadership and bottom-up push but the managers connect these domains. They are the ones that can greatly accelerate or critically hinder a transformation. Which camp are your managers in?

One of the most misinterpreted and misapplied terms in our Industry is the term ‘empowered’. I hear it used over and over from organizations that are new to Agile concepts and have usually know just enough to be dangerous - and dangerous they become. Although I’ve seen this term misapplied in many different roles, it is usually my experience teams that are the biggest culprits, and that’s who I’ll focus on in this blog. Using it more like the term ‘anarchy’, the term ‘empowered’ misused as a reason to get away with everything from reprioritizing the Product Backlog to missing iteration goals. This behavior is one of the most disruptive forces in an Agile transformation.

I thought I’d shed some light on that term and where the term ‘empowered’ does and does not apply.

Let’s start with the definition of empowerment:

em•pow•er•ment [ɪmˈpaʊəmənt]
n
1. the giving or delegation of power or authority; authorization

When it is said that “teams are empowered”, they are given certain authorities where management approval is no longer necessary. This authority is over HOW they work, which includes (but isn’t limited to):

• Own the delivery of an integrated, high quality vertical slice
• Creating, owning and managing the Iteration Backlog – the list of tasks the team collectively needs to complete in the current iteration toward the iteration goals
• Owing their own work-processes – how members of the team work together within the team. This includes, but isn’t limited to, setting up their own meetings, rules of conduct, team norms, etc. – basically those processes that are needed to work effectively as a team
• Being able to create and own their architecture (this may be limited to architecture of a particular section for large-scale development)
• Own their technical practices – be able to practice paired programming, Test-Driven Development, Continuous Integration, Refactoring, etc. without Product Owners or managers telling them not to

However, there are bounds to that empowerment and teams that exceed those bounds are teetering on the edge of:

an•ar•chy ( n r-k )
n.
1. Absence of any form of political authority.

Empowerment turns into anarchy when we here statements like the following thrown around by team members - “We are empowered to...”

• “Change the features in the Product Backlog because we didn’t like what’s there”
• “Change the order of the Product Backlog because the high priority items are boring”
• “Not help our managers, other teams or other colleagues outside the team because we are empowered not to be interrupted” Aside: I actually knew of a team that enclosed themselves behind locked doors so they wouldn’t have to speak to anyone between iterations. I understand empowered not to accept scope creep but not letting anyone even ask a simple question is ridiculous.
• “Deliver nothing!” I knew of several teams that delivered 0, nothing, nada, zip, zilch, you get the picture, for multiple iterations because they told the Product Owners (who weren’t trained, btw) that “the teams were now empowered to choose their own work.” Ummm, no.

So what’s the line between genius and madness - between empowerment and anarchy? Two simple mental models that will act as your litmus test:

1. Product Owners are empowered to decide WHAT features the teams will work on and in which order
2. Teams are empowered to decide HOW they will work on delivering those features.

Two notes to keep in mind:

1. I don’t mean to imply that there is no collaboration but rather final authority on both sides. Teams are welcome and encouraged to give input on priorities but the final decision is the Product Owners and the teams are NOT empowered to override that priority. Product Owners, etc. are welcome to give input and best practices on task breakdown, max. number of hours per task, technical norms, technical practices, etc. but the final decision is up to the team.
2. When you have multiple teams, there may be organizational norms and best practices that the team may have no authority over. It is up to management and ScrumMasters to collectively determine on a case-by-case basis if those are helpful or barriers.

The whole point of these particular empowerments are to create the most innovative and effective organization. It also focuses the different roles to accomplish their goals efficiently. Be wise and watch out for words that are thrown around without making sense.

I’ve been noticing a disturbing trend lately where pundits, bloggers, and practitioners keep insisting there’s only one way to practice Agile software development, and it’s usually their way (go figure). I can’t tell you how many times I’ll read or hear about new Agile practitioners who asked a simple question on an online group or in a conference and hear a one-sided prescriptive approach – and worse, an extreme view that is so out there that few organizations can hope to do anything close when they’re just starting out. And if you’re not practicing certain techniques, which are usually the latest thing from Xaphod Bigbookauthor or Ima Agileguru, these extremists will just say, “you’re not doing Agile!” There’ll be a lot of citing this and quoting that and listing some definition of some practice in some book. If your team doesn’t match what’s on page 462 sub-paragraph 2, section D, you’re not Agile.

Have these people forgotten the meaning of the term AGILE? Or did they just never realize that Agile is not about the tactics but about the goals, the most important goals being continuous learning and continuous improvement? As Rod Belshee, a friend, client and tree-hugger put it, Agile is “about experimenting and assessing. A way to consider what we tried in this type of situation, the data on how it worked, and what to try next. In other words, we do not want Agile to become a rigid set of practices, but remain a way a thinking.”

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not poo-pooing the best practices or the work that many Agile pioneers have done that we as an industry have come to appreciate. What I am saying is those best-practices are getting turned into religion and that the zealots will have you believe that there’s only one way to do it right, that executing a defined set of these practices will make you ‘Agile’. If you aren’t practicing all in this set, you aren’t ‘Agile’. Like that’s the way teams and companies work…that one day, they’ll all just collectively wake up and decide, “Hey, let’s do all of this all at once.” And just like that, voila!, we’re in ‘Agile mode’. This type of dogmatism is not only misguided but leading many people who read and hear this to think that Agile methodologies and practices are not suited for them. More than 75% of the clients I have worked with had one of these dogmatists and had been told they couldn’t be helped. That, of course, wasn’t true.

One size (or set of practices) doesn’t fit all. We have to be the most Agile when it comes to how companies and teams adopt this way of thinking. Some are faster to move and some are slower. Some are passionate from the start and others need to see the value. With ones that are slower (and usually bigger), there are leadership, cultural, technical, process and many other dynamics that need to be overcome. They need a roadmap for migration that takes into account dozens of years of legacy (and usually hurtful) practices ingrained into their culture.

Not every practice has to be done when an organization first starts and not every practice is right for every organization. Practicing Agile means being agile in not only how we work but how we roll out these practices. I would say that a measurable goal (or set of goals) and the continuous pursuit of improvement toward that goal is a magnitude better than dispassionately executing practices because some book told you to do so.