The Agile Hangover

Managers play a crucial role in ensuring a team’s success by managing and directing their employees’ work. Yet, this often involves micromanaging techniques to push developers to work faster and meet imposed milestones. Bugs and operational issues are often discussed in meetings, and blame may be placed on developers for not pushing enough work forward.

Managers manage people, and as long as they are in charge, they are happy to have their direct reports working faster. Managers define roadmaps and milestones and require developers to estimate the work. Still, they are pushed hard to fit their estimates into the imposed milestones.

Product owners do not consider themselves part of the team and do not share the responsibility when things go wrong. We need to consider the process and the people involved in agile transformations. Product owners and managers may only sometimes feel responsible for the team’s success.

Middle management can be helpful, but organizations should weigh the costs and benefits before adding a management layer. Software development is unpredictable, and investing too much time upfront on a plan will generate waste. The time to market is extensive, and end-user learning takes too long. Instead of improving collaboration and benefiting from Agility, teams fall back to a waterfall working mode.

Agility is all about empiricism and collaboration. It will only work well once teams embrace uncertainty and are empowered to do the right thing rather than being forced to do it.

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[¹]: Robert Martin(2019): (Clean Agile: Back to Basics (Robert C. Martin Series))