Managers in most IT organizations and otherwise, typically focus on a variety of tasks. Using the SCO Model of Management, we can divide these tasks in three categories:

• Strategic : As per Wikipedia, strategy is a long term plan of action designed to achieve a particular goal, most often “winning”. A strategy is a careful evaluation of current situation, future scenario [multiple] and alternative choices for the same. Selection of one or combination of alternatives affects the outcome and future. Strategic activities and tasks are about defining a strategy [current and future scenario and how best to get there] as well as continually monitoring and adapting. Considerable portion of activities and tasks are focussed on planning for future. The questions strategists ask is : “What do we do?”, “How do we do it?” and “How do we excel?”. These questions can also be expanded to : “What we should be doing?”, “How we should be doing it?” and “How we can become more effective?”
• Coordinative : Coordinative tasks are mostly tactical in nature. A tactic is a conceptual action used by a small unit to implement a specific mission and achieve a specific objective, or to advance toward a specific goal. A tactic is implemented as one or more tasks. As must be clear from the word, coordinative tasks are about coordination. The goal and vision is already defined and to an extent the path is also available [i.e. strategy is in place]. At a coordinative level, different members of a division as well as resources are channelized into specific activity. The focus is on optimal utilization, processes implementation and team work.
• Operational : Operations or processes are a set of well defined, finite tasks to do something. While there can be defined, finite tasks to do strategic and coordinative tasks as well - the main difference between strategic/ coordinative and operational tasks is repeatability. Most operational tasks are repeatable. It is also easy to come up with quantifiable measures to evaluate the success of operation, after a period of time.

Let’s take an example. “Hiring right” is an important aspect of any business. As a strategist, the focus is on what are the challenges in hiring right. What are the challenges, where people are being sourced from, what is the quality, where else can they be sourced, looking at hiring practice, training and retaining practice and periodic complete compensation/ competitive analysis. A coordinative task in the meanwhile could be to have core HR professionals focus on activities in training/ retaining practice [conducting trainings, orienting people, laying down processes etc.]. Operational tasks are specific activities like conducting the training as per the process, conducting employee feedback survey periodically, analyzing the results, preparing a report and presenting to suitable people. This is what a typical organization works like as well. The highest value tasks get done by senior most managers or managers. Most managers work in the coordinative or strategic space. This is good. However, Internet world and Agile changes some things.

The default assumption above is that flow of control is top down. An effective strategy in Internet world [and a good strategy should keep this in mind anyways] - flow from bottom to top [and we don’t mean moles], needs to come up as well. This flow should not be just simple feedback surveys. The flow is providing significant autonomy to individual units to align them with goals and objectives of organization/ project “as they want to be”. Hence, rather than focusing much on “how to do something”, a broad framework is provided to the team and they figure out how to do this. In short, it changes the hierarchy.

Let’s look at some of the tasks that managers typically perform :

1. Task Breakdown
2. Task Assignment
3. Task Tracking
4. Client Communication
5. Providing feedback to people
6. Recommending Appraisals
7. Interviews
8. Team Building
9. Trainings
10. Strategy Planning
11. Project Reports
12. Attrition Control
13. Value Creation
14. Project Cost Tracking

There can be many more such tasks. Let’s evaluate which of these would not fit in with Agile world. [1], [2] and [3] would not fit in ideally. [4] - [14] would undergo a significant change. For instance, as part of recommending appraisals, the managers would be involved only as one part. A 360-degree feedback along with linked appraisal or same appraisal for whole team based on collective effort are some approaches which can be used. These approaches are not unique to Agile but work well to keep the team at the heart. Similarly, team building happens by creating a spirit in each member to see best interest of the team as well as project and orient themselves towards it without being asked to do. Similarly, value creation is through building people and building systems that make the team hyper productive.  This is definitely tough to do.

Now, when we see the above 03 types of tasks, we see that the role of Manager 2.0 is to ensure that everyone through out the value chain is involved in all the aspects - strategy, coordinative and operational. This requires creation of a democratic work space and choice driven coordination up and down the value chain. We will try and explore this further in our next post.

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