DZone
Agile Zone
Thanks for visiting DZone today,
Edit Profile
  • Manage Email Subscriptions
  • How to Post to DZone
  • Article Submission Guidelines
Sign Out View Profile
  • Post an Article
  • Manage My Drafts
Over 2 million developers have joined DZone.
Log In / Join
  • Refcardz
  • Trend Reports
  • Webinars
  • Zones
  • |
    • Agile
    • AI
    • Big Data
    • Cloud
    • Database
    • DevOps
    • Integration
    • IoT
    • Java
    • Microservices
    • Open Source
    • Performance
    • Security
    • Web Dev
DZone > Agile Zone > Leadership, Management, Transitioning to Agile

Leadership, Management, Transitioning to Agile

Johanna Rothman user avatar by
Johanna Rothman
·
Jan. 22, 12 · Agile Zone · Interview
Like (0)
Save
Tweet
2.04K Views

Join the DZone community and get the full member experience.

Join For Free

I’ve been working with several management teams who want me to train them or their project managers to take over the agile training. It’s not unreasonable from their perspective—it’s how they’ve transitioned to all the other process improvement approaches over the years.

Except, none of the other process improvement approaches have been built on the notion of self-organizing or self-managing teams. None of the other approaches have been built on the idea that leadership emerges from within the teams, not from the top. And, I, the queen of tact and diplomacy, need to find a way to describe this to my clients.

Agile and lean provide a team with plenty of benefits: visualizing the work in a backlog, ranking the work so it’s clear what the first thing to do is at any time, making it possible for a team to swarm around the work, knowing what done means, demoing the work often. All of these benefits make it possible to allow for frequent change, which is the biggest benefit of all.

But the reason agile and lean work so well is that the team drives the work. The team is at the very least, self-directed, where the team works together, but still has some management guidance because they don’t know how to manage their team membership, for example. Many agile teams are self-managing, and some teams are self-organizing.

If the senior management or project management teaches agile, especially if they have never lived agile, it’s incongruent. It would be more congruent to have the team members teach each other agile. That would be the team driving the work.

I can sympathize with management wanting to cap their expenses transitioning to agile. And, training project managers as trainers who have no experience in agile is not a cost-effective way to create a successful transition. Neither is training managers with no experience. The problem is this: in order to teach agile, you need experience doing it so you can diagnose the problems as you see it in the training, because there is no recipe.

There is no recipe because every team of people is unique. There may be common patterns of pitfalls, but how each team solves those problems is often unique to their context.

This is a problem. It means that in one organization you might not have just one definition of agile if one project has silo’d teams across the world and another project has cross-functional teams in one location. The definition will come from the people on the team who will discuss what done means for them, and how they will handle the issues of where the people are, and how to manage the deliverables. The team members will lead from within the team.

How have you explained this notion of the leadership arising from the team to managers?

Source:  http://www.jrothman.com/blog/mpd/2011/12/leadership-management-transitioning-to-agile.html

agile

Opinions expressed by DZone contributors are their own.

Popular on DZone

  • Getting Started With RSocket Kotlin
  • Caching Across Layers in Software Architecture
  • How To Evaluate Software Quality Assurance Success: KPIs, SLAs, Release Cycles, and Costs
  • Modern Application Security Requires Defense in Depth

Comments

Agile Partner Resources

X

ABOUT US

  • About DZone
  • Send feedback
  • Careers
  • Sitemap

ADVERTISE

  • Advertise with DZone

CONTRIBUTE ON DZONE

  • Article Submission Guidelines
  • MVB Program
  • Become a Contributor
  • Visit the Writers' Zone

LEGAL

  • Terms of Service
  • Privacy Policy

CONTACT US

  • 600 Park Offices Drive
  • Suite 300
  • Durham, NC 27709
  • support@dzone.com
  • +1 (919) 678-0300

Let's be friends:

DZone.com is powered by 

AnswerHub logo