Title: What Do Agile Leaders Do?
Scrum is over 20 years old, and by now the roles and responsibilities of the people on a Scrum Team are well-known (if not always practiced in the best way). But what about leaders and managers in agile organizations? What do they do, and why is their support of Scrum essential? This presentation will explore the essential role of agile leadership in supporting, nurturing, and growing agility in their organizations. While cross-functional, self-organizing, self-managing teams are ideal, most teams must progress through a series of stages of maturity before they are fully self-managing. How do agile leaders help them to get there? And what’s left for the leader if or when they do?
Agile Leadership focuses on three things: (1) It creates and nurtures a culture in which experimentation and learning are embraced; (2) It sets audacious performance goals that the organization uses empiricism to pursue; and (3) it creates an organizational structure that reinforces and rewards the other two dimensions.
Not all managers personally exhibit all of these, and not all leaders are managers; some leaders may be informal leaders, but they still have considerable influence.
In practical terms, you should try to make the next step at least every Sprint, and maybe even every day (topic for Daily Scrum).
Next Target Condition: a good Sprint Goal, or at least improvement targets coming out of Sprint Retrospective.
So with my teams, we couldn’t fix the whole product all at once, but we could develop a new user experience. So we formed a small team to work on that, with the audacious goal of having in the next release, which was in 3 months. We already had all the data we needed, we just needed to visualize it in some different ways.