Skip to main content

Delegation, meet Agile

You might not expect to encounter the "delegation" concept in a blog post about agile software development.  After all, agile is all about the "self governing team."  But in the real world, if you are in a company which is transitioning to agile, and you are the project manager of a newly created agile team, you may well need to consider how to create a situation around your team that allows self-governance to emerge without making you completely crazy.  In real life, your first few weeks with your agile team can seem like your worst nightmare.  This is not because there is something wrong with you.  This is completely predictable.  Stop blaming yourself.

If your team is used to having you, as a project manager, take all the responsibility, and you suddenly stop telling people what to do, (along with not setting up their meetings, not taking their notes, and not getting them a projector every single time for every single meeting), you should not expect them to do what is needed, no matter what the Agile Founding Fathers say.  Instead, your team members, being humans, will go ahead and take advantage of you and do whatever they feel like doing.  And remember, they are under a bunch of stress themselves with this whole "agile transformation" thing, so you're not seeing them at their best.

From http://www.careerealism.com/the-8-myths-of-delegation/
As William Godwin argued more than 200 years ago in his anarchist treatise Political Justice, your team is inevitably the product of its enterprise environment--it took years to get them to be the way they are, and they aren't going to morph into self-governing team members in ten seconds.  You can't throw a group of micromanaged developers into a team room and expect them to divide into pairs and start offering to help the testers.
It is beyond all controversy that men who live in a state of equality, or that approaches equality, will be frank, ingenuous and intrepid in their carriage; while those who inhabit where a great disparity of ranks has prevailed will be distinguished by coldness, irresoluteness, timidity and caution.  (Chapter IV)
He has quite the way with words, doesn't he?  Anyway, the point is that the first steps of an agile transition may be experienced by a project manager as a time where people keep telling her to STOP DOING EVERYTHING HERSELF, and yet the work isn't getting done.  That's not the PM's fault, but the PM is in a position to gradually bring the team around, especially if they have a coach hanging around to help.

I realized this week that this "you need to let go" message isn't something new.  This is a special case of the age-old problem of "delegation."  New managers are always taken to task for "doing everything themselves" and not "delegating" as though you should just fecklessly throw your responsibilities out there and hope for the best.  That never made sense, and it doesn't make sense now that you're a newly minted agile project manager.  So what do you do?

I have had the privilege of participating in a leadership training program headed up by Brian McDonald at MOR and Associates, and during this program we addressed the issue of delegation head-on.  In this training, we distinguished between the end goal, which is indeed to have the people responsible for their own actions (or by extension, those of their team), and the MEANS to that end goal, which have a particular shape.  Here are the phases:

  1. Request a particular action and ask for a report:  If you are working with a brand-new agile team, decide as a group how you will be accomplishing tasks, and how you, as the person who will be communicating with your funding authority, will be able to confidently describe your team's status on a daily, weekly, iteration-level, and release-level basis.  Just because you're agile doesn't mean that you are no longer responsible for letting your customer or business user know the status of their investment.  At this stage, aided by a coach, you will negotiate team rules with the group which will keep the team safe:  a new team is not going to sign up for a daily stand-up, a release plan, a story backlog, an up-to-date card wall, or pairing.  Just as in the old days, these steps in your agile evolution are achieved through the age-old process of command-and-control orders followed by feedback that shows the orders are carried out.  This is fine.  This has to happen first in many, many teams.  Do not confuse the means with the end. 
  2. Ask the team to suggest improvements, while still giving you the information you need:  the retrospective is your friend.  You should certainly make sure you hold a team retrospective at the end of each iteration at minimum, but feel free to hold them more often if needed.  During these meetings, re-affirm that you, as project manager, have to report back to your funding authorities about how well you as a group are using their money.  But be open to suggestions from the team on better ways to get the team, you, and the funding authority to your goal.  You still hold the power to say that the team suggestion does or does not work for you, but you are now actively encouraging the team to take responsibility for getting you the information and transparency you need.
  3. Delegate to internal de-facto leaders:  as the team moves forward, you will see who you can trust to ensure things get done, and who seems to be less weight-bearing on the team.  Take the de facto leaders into your circle of trust, and ask these leaders to do what it takes to ensure that internal goals are met on time.  Assign "features" or "epics" to these leaders, and ask them to run them as they see fit, but let you know how they're getting on.  Keep measures like the daily stand-up and the up-to-date card wall in place, but stop being the only person who ensures that things are happening.  Spread and share that load with the first movers in the group.
  4. When it's possible, move to an "agile" concept of the self-governing team,  which may still very much mean that there is a lead BA, a lead developer, and a lead tester whom you as project manager work with to ensure things continue to move smoothly.  You are still responsible for making sure that the funding authorities are getting the best return on your investment, and for showing them that they are.  But you have now cultivated a situation in which the team, or at least a few logical leaders on the team, are taking responsibility for those goals themselves, and you are truly able to step back to a position of removing blockers for the team.  Congratulations!  You've created a self-governing team.
Like everything else in this world that has any value at all, a self-governing team is carefully cultivated and grown.  It cannot be created by fiat.  Your goal should be that you no longer have to supply all of the passion and all the accountability, but please don't blame yourself if the team isn't able to step up immediately the first time you try it.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How Do You Vote Someone Off of Your Agile Team?

One of the conundrums of agile conversion is that although you are ordered by management to "self-organize," you don't get to pick your own team.  You may not have pictured it this way, but your agile team members are going to be the same people you worked with before, when you were all doing waterfall!   I know I wasn't picturing it that way for my first agile team, so I thought I should warn you.  (I thought I was going to get between six and eight original Agile Manifesto signers.  That didn't happen.). Why "warn" you (as opposed to "reassure" you, say)?  Because the agile process is going to reveal every wart, mole, quirk, goiter, and flatulence issue on the team within a few hours.  In the old days, you could all be eccentric or even unpleasant in your own cube, communicating only by document, wiki, email, and, in extreme situations, by phone.  Now you are suddenly forced to interact in real time, perhaps in person, with written messag

A Corporate Agile 10-point Checklist

I'm pretty sure my few remaining friends in the "small, collocated team agile" community are going to desert me after this, but I actually have a checklist of 10 things to think about if you're a product owner at a big company thinking of trying out some agile today.  Some of these might even apply to you if you're in a smaller place.  So at the risk of inciting an anti-checklist riot (I'm sorry, Pez!), I am putting this out there in case it is helpful to someone else. From http://www.yogawithjohn.com/tag/yoga-class/ Here's what you should think about: 1.        Your staffing pattern.  A full agile project requires that you have the full team engaged for the whole duration of the project at the right ratios.  So as you provision the project, check to see whether you can arrange this staffing pattern.  If not, you will encounter risks because of missing people.  Concretely it means that: a.        You need your user experience people (if a

Your Agile Transformation Needs to Start with a Quiet Phase

From a really great blog post on agile adoption:  http://smoovejazz.wordpress.com/2011/02/16/an-agile-approach-for-adopting-agile-practices/ I've observed some different agile transformation patterns, and maybe you have too: Just Do Standups   (Shoot, then Aim):   some people feel that since you're "agile," you should just start doing stuff, like daily standups, and then build more of the the plan as you go.  Find a team and start doing some agile with them!  Start a revolution one practice at a time, one team at a time. Pros:   you're very busy from the start. Cons:   what exactly are you doing and why? KPI-Driven Change (Aim, then Shoot) : some people who have worked in large corporations for a while will tell you that to get the respect of the people, you need to start with a plan, support the plan with awesome printed and online collateral.  Then you "kick off," tell teams what to do, and measure them using "Key Productivity Indica