The Demands Agile Makes on Management

Most organizations understand that implementing Agile will require significant changes to how their project teams operate. However, many organizations do not understand how much management also needs to change for Agile to be successful, and this causes a lot of organizations to not achieve the full benefits of Agile.

16 February 2024

Agile implementations typically focus on changing the way project teams work. However, for Agile to be successful, an organization’s management staff must also make significant changes to how they operate. Unfortunately, these changes are often not made, which results in many organizations not achieving the full benefits of Agile.

In essence, Agile requires an organization’s management staff to change from operating as a traditional command and control structure to operating as something much more akin to a support structure. Many of the benefits of Agile arise as a result of removing extraneous tasks from project teams, and many of the extraneous tasks Agile removes are ones associated with traditional command and control management. Successful Agile organizations actively seek to dramatically reduce the amount of time project teams spend doing things like creating status reports and seeking management approval for changes to requirements, and dramatically increase the amount of time the same teams spend working shoulder-to-shoulder with end users to create needed products.

In order for Agile to be successful, an organization’s management staff needs to be comfortable having less direct control over projects than they did before Agile was implemented. This rightfully makes many management team members uneasy. Traditional management practices emphasize management’s responsibility to direct and control organizations. Agile demands management step back from this and allow non-management staff to determine and implement the best ways for the organization to achieve its goals. This is a big change.

Agile demands an organization’s management staff significantly change how it operates, and management staff are justified in feeling uneasy about making the required changes. Nonetheless, these changes must be made in order for an organization to achieve the full benefits of Agile. Management teams that fail to make the changes Agile demands restrict the ability of their project teams to operate efficiently, therefore negating many of the benefits of Agile.

Instead of seeking to directly control projects, management staff at Agile organizations should focus on making sure project teams are provided what they need to be successful. The two most important things needed by Agile project teams are information and trust. To ensure a project aligns with and supports the overall goals and objectives of an organization, Agile project teams must know what the organization’s goals and objectives are. This requires Agile management staff to keep project teams much more up to speed on where an organization is heading than is traditionally the case. A manager overseeing a project team at an Agile organization should be telling the project team everything they would want to know if they were still directly controlling the project. Doing anything less is setting the project team up to fail.

Once a project team has all the information needed to successfully complete a project, an Agile organization’s management staff should trust them to do so and step back out of the way. This does not mean management should not check in ever so often to see how the project is going, and it definitely does not mean management should not be responsive when the project team needs something, but it does mean management staff should always keep in mind that their Agile job is to support the project team, not vice versa.