When I was promoted to a management role, I realized that the skills that made me standout as a programmer were not the skills I needed in my new role. I started reading. I found a mentor. I applied for a graduate program in leadership. But I was something of an exception. Many managers feel
(This article originally appeared on Gantthead.com) “The beginning is the most important part of the work.” Plato, Greek philosopher and writer, 429–347 B.C.E. I’ve written several articles about a manager’s relationship with a team that has already formed. A manager’s relationship with a team as they work is essential for cultivating a self-organizing team and
I recently met with a group of managers who work in organizations adopting agile methods. Several of them asked whether functional managers should become ScrumMasters or coaches. That’s a risky road. One manager was adamant. In his view, making managers ScrumMasters was the best course of action. According to this fellow, managers already know people’s
At a recent conference, I over-heard three managers talking about self-organizing teams. “You can’t just turn people loose and let a team make all the decisions. They’ll mess things up. And with all these ScrumMasters, coaches, and self-organizing teams, sounds like I’m out of a job,” said one with resignation. “This time boxing thing is
(this article originally appeared on gantthead.com) Agile project management depends on transparency and feedback. Visibility into the product and process is built in with iteration reviews and retrospectives. Task walls and Kanban boards make progress (or lack of it) and bottlenecks obvious. Stand-up meetings seek to raise impediments to management attention. But are managers ready
I was talking to my friend Penny the other day about a team she coaches. There’s a really smart guy on the team. I’ll call him Bob. Most of the time Bob is an asset to the team. But when the team needs to decide on a technical solution under time pressure, he’s not. “But
An effective hierarchy provides enough central control for coordinated action in achieving the aim of the organization. At the same time, the hierarchy must provides enough autonomy for subsystems to function, self-organize, flourish. Yes. But how to do that? Let me walk you through a scenario that describes the challenge. I’ve seen a number of
Most of the time, people integrate into groups well enough that we don’t really notice how it happens. But a recent rocky experience got me noticing. Looking back over several teams I’ve observed and groups I’ve been part of, here are three (rather spectacular) examples of a newcomer failing to integrate. *** A skilled XP
One of the traps people fall into on teams is withholding information that’s critical for the team to function. Sometimes the information is about friction between team members. When team members don’t have a way to talk about small frictions, they turn in to big events, damage relationships and spill over onto the team. So
Agile coaches are expected to help teams learn agile methods, engineering techniques, and improve the productivity of the teams they work with. But before they can do they need to be ready to coach. Being ready to coach means that you have coaching skills, relevant technical and process skills. But the foundational skill in coaching