The Role of Management

One of the talk I really enjoyed at XP2012 was: The Manager's Dilemma by Ola Sundin. In this talk Ola tried to answer a simple question that always rises when an organization is starting to adopt Scrum: What is the management role?

Manager as the developers of the Organization

It was lighting talk (15 minutes), so there was not a lot of content there, but there was a single excellent idea. The managers are the people which are responsible for making the organization better.
while the team, the SM & the PO  are in charge of developing a product making it better. Managers are there in order to improve the organization in order for it to become more valuable to its customers (share holders).
Using this basic idea Ola showed how he managed to bring all the managers into a single “scrum” team and use the basic scrum framework to manage their work. The had a daily they had a nice visible board, they created their own backlog of items etc.
And it all started by making the managers do a Gemba walk each day. That is the managers made themselves truly available for the team, by walking around and communicating to people each day.
The rest of the details can be found in his slides
Remember:

Managers are people too, Ola Sundin, XP2012 Malmo.

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Posted in: Agile Management