(2019-04-19) Jeffries Anti-Management? No Different Management

Ron Jeffries: Anti-Management? No, Different Management. Agile Software Development, as contemplated by the Agile Manifesto, isn’t anti-management. It’s much more radical than that: it’s a quite different approach to management. tweetstorm

The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams. (Product Team) (cf 2018-10-31-CaganEmpoweredProductTeams)

new way that software development should be managed, with self-organization and incremental, evolutionary techniques based on the sustainable production of working software.

In Scrum classes, people often ask about various management functions. There’s a classic exercise in response to that, where the class groups write down all the management functions they can think of, on post-it notes. Then they put the notes down in four locations: Dev Team, Product Owner, ScrumMaster, and Other.

What is clear, however, is that Scrum intends that whatever those outside functions are, their interface with the team is primarily, perhaps only via Sprint review. Specifically, no one other than the Product Owner can ask the team to do anything, which is a pretty specific limit on what “managers” can do while the Scrum Team is in effect.

more commonly, individual management structures are left in place on top of Agile: the various team members “belong” to one manager or another, and that manager continues to try to exercise control over what the team members do.

leads to conflict, confusion, and quite often is the primary source of would-be Agile organizations moving toward Dark Agile™.