Spikes And Stories

Scrum tips and agile insights from a Silicon Valley agile coach

Practical Advice for Managers in an Agile Shop

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In my last blog post, I wrote about the side effects of manager as Product Owner.  In it, I talked about how I believe these roles should be filled by different people.  So if the manager isn’t directing the work, what’s s/he doing? How does a manager help his/her people when they’re distributed across multiple teams?  The Scrum Guide is silent on the topic, and although I offered up some of my own opinions in Managers in an Agile Shop, I didn’t offer much practical advice.  Let’s fix that.  Today, I’ll bias my advice toward the actionable, and I think it all can summarized in these wise words by Ed Catmull:

It’s not the manager’s job to prevent risks.  It is the manager’s job to make it safe to take them.

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What Metrics Will My Team Find Useful?

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Let’s try something different today.  I’d like to tell you a story.  To do it justice, I won’t write about it.  Instead, I’ll share a video where I told this story to an agile group here in Silicon Valley, and it began as I wrestled with several questions:
 
  1. Can data help our teams improve?  If so, what kind of data?
  2. How do we responsibly use this data?
  3. Can metrics help the teams and the organization embrace a culture of experimentation?
  4. Data isn’t enough.  How can we tie it to the motivations and passions of our team members?
In the video below, I share my experiences as I attempt to answer these questions while I worked with the teams at Study.com.  However, before we begin, I want to mention a few things:

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Why Process and Efficiency Are Terrible Words

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Words are hard.  They shouldn’t be, but they are.  We each internalize a definition of a word, and more oft than not, our internal definition conflicts with someone else’s.  Even ancient Greek philosophers like Epictetus faced this problem offering this advice:

First learn the meaning of what you say, and then speak.

Today, let’s talk about two words I see organizations and individuals struggle with: process and efficiency.

In my experience, these are terrible words.  Of course, they didn’t start as terrible.  They began as respectable words.  After all, wouldn’t we want efficient teams?  And shouldn’t we manage our chaotic environments by adhering to some process?  Perhaps.  Unfortunately, their definitions vary so widely from one person to the next that I do my best to avoid them all together.

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Should You Experiment with LeSS?

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We’ve begun experimenting with Large-Scale Scrum, or LeSS, and thus far, it’s been an interesting journey.  I eluded to this experiment with LeSS in Two Principles for Scaling Any Agile Approach, and I also gave a bit of background into where we are in our agile evolution.  The abridged version is we’re several years into a Lean Startup, XP, and Scrum adoption.  Read more here.

To be clear, my thoughts today are simply my initial impressions.  We’re six weeks into our experiment with LeSS so we’ve hardly dipped our toe in the water.  It’s possible that months from now our perspectives and challenges will change.  With that in mind, let’s begin with what’s worked well.

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