Agile Organisations adopt the Scrum framework for developing innovative products and services. According to the Scrum guide, the Scrum framework has just 3 roles.
- Product Owner
- Scrum Master
- Development Team
With most organisations undergoing an Agile transformation, are we saying that traditional management roles like project, program and functional managers are obsolete or no longer needed?
I would say ‘NO’; managers still play an essential part in an Agile organisation, and below are the reasons why?
- Functional managers create teams
- Managers define boundaries within which a team is permitted to self-organize. For example, the team can only work on accounting software, not on an HR portal.
- Managers provide a clear, elevated goal for the feature teams to achieve.
- Managers also compose teams and have a say in the initial team formation.
- Managers can also change composition of a Scrum team (if required).
- Managers empower Scrum teams by delegating some of his/her responsibilities to them.
- Nurture resources
- Managers take care of the training needs of the team members, whether it is technical, behavioural or domain-specific.
- They provide functional area leadership. As, some of the managers can be an expert in a particular domain/area.
- They help maintain team integrity by keeping the same resources together (long-lived feature teams) for a long time.
- Promote Agile culture
- Managers must embrace Agile values and principles. They should understand and honestly believe them. They should also encourage others to do the same.
- Managers remove Organization level impediments for the smooth functioning of the Scrum teams.
- Managers must help spread Agile adoption in other areas of the organisation like Finance, Sales, Operations, Marketing and HR.
- Managers sometimes also align with external vendors for an Agile transformation. They do so to save time & effort in creating and forming internal Scrum teams. Instead, they can have a fixed-price contract with the vendor partner and complete the Agile transformation at a fixed price.
- Manage value creation flow, manage economics
- Program managers in Agile organisations still manage economics for their areas. This frequently occurs through their involvement in portfolio management and corporate governance.
- They keep track of the progress of the projects through Sprint reports and metrics, they do join Sprint reviews.
- To effectively manage value creation, managers should adopt a holistic perspective rather than a localized one.
Following picture summarizes the blog in a simpler way:
Hope above blog is helpful to you. Looking forward to your feedback.
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