This Dainty’s Not for You
The Agile Manifesto was written by software developers for software development projects. The 12 principles of the agile manifesto each specifically deal with software development and software developers. None of the values or principles require management or any other role in a corporate organization. Indeed, every value and every principle is invalidated or, at the very least, impaired by giving authority to managers or coaches over any of its practices.
Developers eagerly embrace (or at least they once embraced) the values and principles. It’s not hard to sell them. They already know they need them. Even more, there’s no real money to be made telling developers how to employ an Agile approach. They innately know how.
Worse, as more developers embrace Agile, fewer managers have anything substantive to do. If real Agile takes hold, their corporate value diminishes. Such a management crisis explains why we have coaches, rigid frameworks, meaningless but consuming ceremonies, and countless, indulgent time-wasters in testament of the manager’s indispensability.
The manager’s perversion of the developers’ Agile emancipation is just another repetition of the 19th-century command and control approach to ruling the laborer.
After twenty years of such perversion, the scales slowly fall from some corporate eyes. The trend is slow to arrive. (It took 20 years!) Real Agile will die in the halls of industry if these truths aren’t discussed and debated where such decisions are made.
The Whole Is Less Than the Parts
Companies, like oceans, have many species; some more influential than others. In my esteem, modern corporate structure has a minimum of seven organizational boxes:
- Overseers
- Managers
- Coaches
- Producers
- Designers
- Administrators
and
- Maintenance
Each of these boxes has many individual job titles. The following might be good examples.
- Overseers: mahogany row, shareholders
- Managers: middle, VPs
- Coaches: Scrum, SAFe, Agile trainers
- Producers: sales, developers, assemblers, manufacturers
- Designers: engineer, analyst, marketer, architect
- Administrators: finance, HR, operations, data entry
- Maintenance: IT, physical
Must a company support every role? The question is subjective; so is the answer.
Ask different people. You’ll get different answers.
Who Do You Save?
If everyone’s riding in an ever-shrinking lifeboat with waning provisions and dwindling prospects, who goes overboard first?
I’ll share my bias:
- Coaches
- Designers
- Managers
- Maintenance
- Administrators
- Producers
The Overseers go down with the boat.
[In fact, Maintenance and Managers could swap hierarchies and the end result would be similar. Others have the wherewithal to carry the maintenance and the management burdens. Eliminating one or the other is only a matter of preference and opportunity.]
This correlates to the old thought experiment:
Place ten managers in a room with specifications and all materials and tools they need to produce a software outcome for a client.
Place ten programmers in a room with identical specs and materials.
Come back in ten days.
See which room has a software product that will satisfy the clients.
Both thought experiments point to a suspicion I’ve held about business for the past three decades: that managers run businesses as a growth medium for managers. If other roles can support the need for managers, then they’re added.
In fact, ask any manager why they manage and they’ll tell you they’d rather not manage, but they cannot avoid it. Still, when asked what else they would do, they mention golf, fishing, watching sports, and many other pastimes that have nothing to do with business.
Parasites
Of the above hierarchy, much experience points to the top three, Coaches/Designers/Managers, as parasitic. Irony abounds. Managers talk down to managers who cannot control their overhead. But managers are overhead. Eliminating management (and coaches and designers) eliminates the largest or most obvious source of unproductive expense.
“What do you mean, unproductive?” the managers wail.
Everything managers do in a modern company can be done with computer reports, predictive analysis, self-reporting, and direct communication with the producers. Management has become highly inefficient to streamlined businesses.
“You’ve done it to yourselves.”
We Don’t Need No Thought Control
But what if? Just, what if? What if an enterprise shifted from historic management of the unproductive hall-monitor role to skilled, enlightened leadership?
I’ll explain.
Firstly, this wouldn’t save the manager’s job. It replaces the manager with something better. Skilled, Enlightened Leadership.
Skilled, Enlightened Leadership (SEL) is a form of technical excellence whereby skilled and experienced technical producers take on some or all of the responsibilities of coordination, support, and mentorship of technical groups to which they report?
Did you notice that SEL reports to the technical producers? That’s the first change. Did you notice they don’t tell technical producers how to do what they do? That’s the second change. And did you notice that SEL does not stand in for technical producers’ communications? That’s the third change.
But the most tectonic change is in the fact that they must be, themselves, skilled technical producers who have chosen to become an umbrella role for all other producers. This is why SEL will never take hold: it replaces, rather than renames, management.
There’s a hint in the underlying change. It’s called leadership, not management. Skilled technical producers can organize, plan, and manage themselves. They don’t need anyone else to tell them how. Wake up and smell the chip overload.
SEL doesn’t coach. They mentor. They can train in the technology. They can lead any group but chose to lead through liberty. They give groups the freedom to work as they find best. And they protect groups who struggle as well as those that succeed. With a keen technical eye, SEL can identify when one group can help another and make the right introductions.
SEL individuals can teach and mentor, by working side by side, or participating as the fabled “rubber frog.” SEL leads, but does not manage. And just how many SEL members does a company need?
A small group of developers does not need an SEL. An organization with four or five producing technical groups may need a single SEL.
(Do the math. This single SEL just replaced as many as fifteen managers/coaches/designers.)
Who wants to be a Skilled, Enlightened Leader? I’ll warn you, SEL spends a lot less time on the golf course. Salesmen still do. Maybe managers should bother the sales group.