A common misconception about agile is that managers are unnecessary. After all, agile is based on self-organizing teams. If the teams organize themselves, what do managers do? Unfortunately, most scrum training plays into that. Think about it: how many trainers or coaches have you seen sketch the structure of a scrum team with a drawing that includes a manager? While there's always a scrum master and a product owner, the core team and maybe some stakeholders, have you ever seen a manager in that drawing? This misconception can be a problem all around: A frequently cited barrier to agile adoption is managers who don't know what to do when their teams become self-managing. When they're not included in training, how would they (or anyone else, for that matter) know how to characterize their role. At the same time, organizations often lay down expectations of managers, some compatible with agile, some not. Agile has clearly shifted the old roles and responsibilities. Managers bent on command-and-control are clearly a barrier to agile adoption. But managers who take a hands-off approach or are treading water in a sea of ambiguity will almost certainly stymie adoption, as well. Ron Lichty believes (and so do a lot of leading agile thought leaders) that managers have critical roles to play in enabling success, both of transitions to agile and of agile itself. This session is about those roles.

1. Crash Course:
Becoming an Agile Manager"
!
"
"Ron Lichty, principal, Ron Lichty Consulting
author, Managing the Unmanageable"
www.RonLichty.com, www.ManagingTheUnmanageable.net "

2. Ron Lichty,
Managing Software People Teams
SOFTWEST

3. * Addison Wesley published October 2012
*

4. Why we wrote:
* Addison Wesley published October 2012
*

5. Rules of Thumb / Nuggets of Wisdom*
* 300 in the book

6. 6
The Problem:
Where Is the Manager?
ScrumTeam.jpg (from Exploring Scrum- the Fundamentals, by Dan Rawsthorne Doug Shimp)

7. 7
The Problem:
Where Is the Manager?

8. 
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
Agile Learning Labs, Laura Powers

9. Managers and Agile
• A common misconception is that because
of this reliance on self-organizing teams,
there is little or no role for leaders of agile
teams. Nothing could be further from the
truth.
--Mike Cohn, Succeeding with Agile

10. Managers and Agile
• Roles your team still needs you to play
• Roles (and styles) that are inappropriate
• Roles that are deprecated
• Roles that change, sometimes dramatically
• Roles that are new

11. Managing the Unmanageable:
Rules, Tools, and Insights for Managing Software
People and Teams
• Why We Programmers Are Hard to Manage
• Understanding Programmers
• Finding and Hiring Great Programmers
• Getting New Programmers Started Off Right
• Managing Down
• Managing Up, Out, and Yourself
• Motivating Programmers
• Establishing a Successful Programming Culture
• Managing Successful Software Delivery

12. Managers and Agile
• Creating an Agile Culture
• Supporting Agile Values
• Empowering Self-Organization Excellence
• Removing Impediments
• Counseling, Coaching and Mentoring
• Resource Management

13. Managers and Agile
• Creating an Agile Culture

14. Managers and Agile
• Creating an Agile Culture
McGregor's X-Y Theory
From: Managing the Unmanageable: Rules, Tools, and Insights for Managing Software People and Teams

15. Managers and Agile
• Creating an Agile Culture
Lean-Agile management is the art of leading people, not
managing them... Leading people involves creating the
correct environment, focusing them on the right things,
and trusting them to do their work...
In Lean-Agile, the manager has two primary
responsibilities:
• setting the outcomes or goals expected of the team;
• assisting the doers in creating a better process and
workspace to get their jobs done...
--Alan Shalloway, Net Objectives

16. Managers and Agile
• Creating an Agile Culture

17. Managers and Agile
• Creating an Agile Culture
• Supporting Agile Values
• Empowering Self-Organization Excellence
• Removing Impediments
• Counseling, Coaching and Mentoring
• Resource Management

18. Managers and Agile
• Supporting Agile Values

19. Managers and Agile
• Supporting Agile Values
Methodology
You
Use
Methodology
You
Associate
with
Increase
Profits
Agile
Blended
(Some
Waterfall
and
Some
Agile)
Lean
Waterfall
Agile
73.9%
13.0%
9.8%
0.0%
Blended
(Some
Waterfall
and
Some
Agile)
31.8%
46.2%
10.6%
6.1%
Lean
14.3%
0.0%
42.9%
14.3%
Waterfall
15.8%
50.0%
18.4%
13.2%
Don't
Know
5.3%
42.1%
26.3%
5.3%
From The 2013 Study of Product Team Performance

20. Managers and Agile
• Supporting Agile Values
The Agile Manifesto
– We value:
• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
• Working software over comprehensive documentation
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• Responding to change over following a plan
-- http://agilemanifesto.org/

21. Managers and Agile
• Supporting Agile Values
Value the Agile Manifesto over sets of practices
– We value:
• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
• Working software over comprehensive documentation
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• Responding to change over following a plan
-- http://agilemanifesto.org/

22. Managers and Agile
• Creating an Agile Culture
• Supporting Agile Values
• Empowering Self-Organization Excellence
• Removing Impediments
• Counseling, Coaching and Mentoring
• Resource Management

23. Managers and Agile
• Empowering Self-Organization Excellence
When teams self-organize there's still plenty for
managers to do... a managers job is to engineer
the organization so that teams can do their best
work.
--Esther Derby, co-founder, Scrum Alliance

24. Managers and Agile
• Empowering Self-Organization Excellence
Be a damper to the noise. --Joe Kleinschmidt, CTO
Image ID: 529149, Uploaded to http://www.sxc.hu/photo/529149 by winjohn on May 16, 2006, John Evans, Winchester, Hants, United Kingdom, www.thetippingpoint.co.uk

25. Managers and Agile
• Empowering Self-Organization Excellence
From Managing the Unmanageable: Rules, Tools, and Insights for Managing Software People and Teams, by Mickey W. Mantle and Ron Lichty

26. Managers and Agile
• Creating an Agile Culture
• Supporting Agile Values
• Empowering Self-Organization Excellence
• Removing Impediments
• Counseling, Coaching and Mentoring
• Resource Management

27. Managers and Agile
• Removing Impediments
Managers are still needed. Not so much for
their planning and controlling ability, but for
the important job of interfacing on the team s
behalf with the rest of the organization.
--Diana Larsen, co-author, Agile Retrospectives

28. Managers and Agile
• Removing Impediments
Ensure slack: slack is critical to throughput
100% capacity results in bottlenecks
--photo (c) Bud Adams, SXC, www.aimpgh.com

29. Managers and Agile
• Creating an Agile Culture
• Supporting Agile Values
• Empowering Self-Organization Excellence
• Removing Impediments
• Counseling, Coaching and Mentoring
• Resource Management

30. Managers and Agile
• Counseling, Coaching and Mentoring
Photo by Esti Alvarez, Some rights reserved, http://www.Flickr.com/photos/esti/4638056301/

31. Managers and Agile
• Creating an Agile Culture
• Supporting Agile Values
• Empowering Self-Organization Excellence
• Removing Impediments
• Counseling, Coaching and Mentoring
• Resource Management

32. Managers and Agile
• Resource Management
Always be recruiting!
--Mickey Mantle and Ron Lichty,
Managing the Unmanageable: Rules, Tools, and Insights for
Managing Software People and Teams

33. Managers and Agile
• Resource Management
Always be recruiting!
Deal with problem employees

34. Managers and Agile
• Critical to agile transformational success
• Key roles in agile
• Engage managers
• Clarify managerial roles

35. Ron Lichty Consulting
• Mentoring and Coaching and Consulting:
– http://ronlichty.com
• The book:
Managing the Unmanageable:
Rules, Tools Insights for Managing Software People Teams
– http://ManagingTheUnmanageable.net
• The study:
2013 Study of Product Team Performance
– http://ronlichty.blogspot.com
• Training: forthcoming:
– The Agile Manager
– Managing Software People and Teams