Your Management Job in an Agile Environment

Introduction

You develop your software products using agile approaches. You are doing Scrum, Kanban, Scrumban, Lean, or LeSS. Your collaborators start asking questions about organisation, management roles, and critique the internal processes - e.g. employee yearly evaluation, bonus evaluation - work. You hear strange statements such "Be agile, do not do agile".

You as a manager realise you have to describe your role in an agile environment. What does it mean?

Scrum Masters are not Administrators

Lately I was asked if I was interested to work as Scrum master. The below job description was handed me over. What an experience it was. 

What does a Scrum Master?

What does a Scrum master the whole day? Are you just a fancy administrator or are you actively removing impediments? Do you coach your teams toward mastery?

Too often Scrum masters become Scrum administrators. They schedule meetings, moderate discussions, write progress reports and draw beautiful slides how to improve the organization. Or worst they collect extensive statistics about velocity, planned versus delivered story points or how precise story estimation was.

At the end of the day your job is to mentor your team to be champions and build awesome products. Wake up! You are not a project manager, you shall be a catalyst.

So Called Agile and Scrum Failures

Agile will never guarantee project success. All projects, especially application development, entail risk. If a project was risk free it is unlikely to provide significant benefits or competitive advantages. There are however, a number of ways in which Agile Scrum projects repeatedly fail which are worth examining.

Git Local Repositories for the Impatient

Start using Git

You shall put your source code under a version management system. The actual industrial standard is git, a distributed version control system - DVCS -.

Install git on your development machine. If you are using IntelliJ IDEA configure git in the IDE through the preferences pane.

What is Our Specialty as Agile Coaches at tangly?

Currently you have more agile coaches on the market than sand corns on a regular beach. They all promise the holly grail of agile product development, highly productive teams and perfect applications for internal and external customers.

Why should any sane customer hire us to deploy or perfect their agile approach?

Agile Trends Switzerland 2017: We Won

It is time to throw a big party in Switzerland. More than 60% of all projects are now realised using an agile approach (see Agile Trends Switzerland 2017 by SwissQ), Scrum being the most popular one, Kanban as the second one. What a change in just one year. In 2016 we had 40% of projects being agile, one year later we have 60%. Time to adapt and become agile.