There is a lot of noise around the management of Agile. A new discipline of Agile Management seems to be necessary and is discussed on conferences, in articles and is the base on new consulting products.
Agile as a body of knowledge has its roots in Agile Software Development. For many years the community ignored the managers. Statements that managers aren’t needed anymore in agile organisations were not very helpful to adopt new agile methods. Nowadays the management practices are much more in focus by the agile community. We understand that management plays the important role in the change process towards Agile.
What is an Agile Organisation?
The agility of an organisation can be described as the ability of this organisation to adapt to new market conditions. Depending on the products and the market the required agility may differ to actually qualify it as an Agile Organisation. Even with traditional processes a company could achieve some level of agility. Agility of an organisation’s business alone is not enough to call it an Agile Organisation.
What I mean with Agile Organisation is the use of agile methods and the compliance to the Agile Manifesto for a group of people within a company. For example a multi-team Scrum organisation that creates one product can be called an Agile Organisation. The management of the Agile Organisation is the focus of this post.
What is Agile Management?
Agile Management is the management practice in the context of an Agile Organisation.
The term Agile Management indicates that there is something special in the management of Agile compared against the management of traditional organisations. While this may be true depending on the context, the knowledge in science of complex social systems and self-managed teams exists already for many year. The agile movement has not invented a new type of management. It rather discovered the knowledge and has incorporated it into the Agile body of knowledge. This means for managers that want to move to Agile – apart from learning the essentials of agile methods – they can re-learn or improve the knowledge about management based on what already exists in science.
There is nothing unique about the management of agile organisation, so I did not recommend to use the term Agile Management. It’s because people may anchor on the wrong things: agile people may think that Agile Management is new and they have to teach managers their own – agile – way of management and managers may think that Agile Management is not adoptable in their company or it’s a buzz word, that has nothing todo with real management.
My experience is that using the word Agile for everything, like Agile Marketing, Agile World or Agile Management, is not helping us to adopt our body of knowledge. I usually explain the real business benefits and the insights to convince people. Labelling it as Agile often creates immediate resistance.
What is good management?
We had a discussion on our company how an agile manager should behave. We brainstormed several properties of an agile manager, that I cannot fully recall. It was something like: supportive, empower the team, remove impediments, …
My colleague David from the UK noted, that all these properties will make the manager a good manager (in the context of product development). Even, if no agile methods are used at all, a manager that behaves and leads his people like this, would create a very helpful environment for product development.
This means that we have organisations out there that are not using agile methods but with good management. I met some of these managers. Although they were not heading an agile organisation, they understood very well, what it takes to lead in the context of Agile. One difference is that agile organisations require good management. Agile does not stick in an organisation with bad management.
In the next posts I will continue with the topic „Leading in Agile“.