In our last post we saw the typical role played by a manager traditionally. We also saw how this leads to more of a top down control with some minor variations. We also discussed how in an Agile world most of the role definition and the tasks that they do undergo a change. Some of the day to day transactional tasks like task reporting, task division etc. are no longer done by them. Some others like providing feedback change the way these are done. In addition, they have to do some more tasks. These are classified under servant leadership, as discussed in our post on Scrum Master. There is also significant segmentation of the roles of Product Owner and Scrum Master.

Let’s visit the old SCO model and see how strategic, coordinative and operational activities are carried out by the team and Scrum Master and Product Owner in this regard.

The Team :

• Strategic : The team makes decisions regarding which practices it would use, how much work it can commit to during a sprint, identifies obstacles and opportunities for growth that would help technical architecture of the practice.
• Coordinative : The team is self organizing. They use variety of tools like daily stand up, sprint retrospectives and sprint backlog for internal coordination and others like sprint planning, project or product backlog and sprint review with the marketing leadership/ product owner.
• Operational : This is left for the team to identify for themselves. However, number of XP Practices like refactoring, test driven development, shared code etc. However, the choice is left for the team.

Scrum Master or Process Coach:

• Strategic : Scrum Master is in charge of the Scrum Process/ Agile Framework. She checks that the values are being followed or not. She helps the team identify obstacles and remove them. In short, she is in charge of the productivity of the team.
• Coordinative : Scrum Master or Process Coach can sometimes work as a coordinative mechanism with other departments. Intra-team coordination is generally left to the team unless two team members specifically ask Scrum Master or Process Coach to intervene. In some situations, some tasks in this domain require expertise or responsibility that goes beyond the spirit of Scrum Master. These can be things like interviewing new people for the job, giving individual performance feedback, recommending salary appraisals, being responsible for attrition and individual growth etc. Typically, organizations employ a Manager. A Manager can sometimes work as Scrum Master + other tasks or do only “the tasks” while Scrum Master goes about monitoring the Scrum Process.
• Operational : This is not defined. Scrum Master or Process Coach can use tools at their disposal like observance, notes etc. to do their work. As most of their work is thought process, speaking and engagement - defining exact tools is slightly wishful.

Product Owner: 

• Strategic : The success of the product is product owners responsibility. She is responsible for gathering customer requirements, prioritizing them, setting the release schedule, getting the right product built. In short, the strategic success plan has to come from the product owner. She can sometimes as a part of this, discuss with the team, the skills and requirements for this success.
• Coordinative : The product owner engages with the team at sprint planning, sprint review and by drafting a project backlog. She is also available through out the sprint for any questions and discussions. The team works at any given time as per the priority defined by the product owner.
• Operational : The operational tasks of Product Owner involve gathering requirements, gathering market feedback, prioritizing requirements, communication and tracking product success.

Manager 2.0 :

• Strategic : Focuses on Value Creation. We find focus on creating processes as per Lean Principles, a great starting point. Hence, a Manager 2.0 would focus on:
  • Eliminating waste
  • Building quality in processes and systems - making systems mistake proof
  • Creating a culture of respect for all people
  • Focus on the value for the end customer
  • Optimizing the whole
    • We will expand on this in the posts on Lean Engineering Principles.
• Coordinative : A Manager can take on the responsibility for arranging resources, people, interviewing, feedback, appraisals - all the tasks which if done by Process Coach/ Scrum Master would actually hamper their ability to inspire trust. In a way, a manager’s job becomes more difficult than a Process Coach/ Scrum Master. They have to not only do some tasks which require certain authority and reporting, but also keep the environment trust worthy and open.
• Operational : This does not differ much from operational tasks that they do anyways. However, significant percentage of their tasks are thinking and communication based. Hence, appropriate choice of tools is more important.

Overall, Manager 2.0 would be responsible for creation of a value based people driven culture. They also would be responsible for scaling Agile and helping the team identify appropriate practices. There main role is best summed up this way “They create a self organizing team and empower it so much, that they themselves are no longer needed. Hence, its more of a self burning role.“

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Posted on May 6th, 2008 by admin
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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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Posted on May 3rd, 2008 by admin
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