The VersionOne Agile Industry Survey has listed “Company philosophy or culture at odds with core agile values” and “Lack of management support” as 2 of the top 5 reasons cited as inhibitors to success in adopting Agile practices for the last 11 years running. Apparently, no one has made much progress in resolving that problem!
These issues can be symptoms of a larger IT leadership opportunity. It’s well known that traditional, top-down leadership can hinder, or completely smother, an agile IT transformation. So why aren’t more IT leaders embracing the new mindset of agile? The root cause of the problem might just be that leaders tend to hang on to their old ways of managing because their new management roles in an agile organization are not well defined.
Agile consultants and training programs focus on the importance of coaching and the roles played by the Scrum Master and Product Owners. They touch briefly on the different management styles and make recommendations on styles that are more conducive to leading Agile teams, but don’t provide much guidance to managers and mid-level executives on the role they should play in an Agile organization. If structured, hierarchical organizations are a thing of the past, what place do IT leaders have in the new unstructured organizations?
The leading agile frameworks recommend that managers take on an administrative management role to support their teams. There are roles for Scrum Masters, Product Owners, UX Designers, and Architects, but the role of the Agile Manager, Agile Director, or Agile VP are left open for interpretation, or even worse, for extinction. The recommendation they propose is that managers focus on hiring, rewarding, funding, and otherwise enabling high-performing teams. The mid-manager now is a supporting role for the team instead of a functionally critical part of what the team does. In fairness to agile frameworks like LESS and SAFe, the topic of management’s role is outside the scope of their main mission. I have the upmost respect for each of these frameworks and have studied both extensively. They provide excellent guidance on how to scale Agile practices in a large organization. My goal is not to call out their deficiencies, but to make a more general point about the uncertain future for managers swept up in an Agile transformation effort.
A change initiative needs to generate a sense of urgency for change, have a compelling vision for the future, and a credible plan on how to get from current state to future state. In most change initiatives, the future state for IT leaders is murky at best. Most IT leaders I know are more than willing to adopt a lean/agile mindset but tune out when the conversation turns to the topic of organizational change. Future organization planning is often only a topic for closed door meetings and hushed hallway discussions. The feared “R” word (reorg) strikes fear into the troops and creates churn in the ranks that destroys productivity. IT leaders also fear that critical resources will jump ship early if they don’t see a place for themselves in the future organization.
Keeping the future organization plan secret, or worse, up to chance is even more disruptive to a transformation than addressing it outright. If left up to chance, the result will likely be that the new organization will look pretty much like the old organization. A better approach is to have your leaders involved in making decisions about the future organization. If your leadership team knows that fewer team managers will be needed but more product managers will be needed in the future, they can begin to position themselves accordingly. The more notice they are given to plan for a future role in the organization, the more valued they will feel. If your Directors and Managers have a role in designing the value stream or large solution organizations for the future organization, they will be more committed to making them successful.
Future IT management roles will be aligned to the future structures of agile organizations. This will require mid-level management to develop expertise in leading demand portfolio teams, Agile Release Trains, Large Solution programs, system teams, and matrixed teams with functional disciplines.
The Agile (IT) Organization 