Dude! Where's my manager? or Why you should attend LESS2011

Many teams start their agile transition from the "developer-side". This is quite normal, developers (coders and testers) feel the pain more than others because they need to actually get the product/system finished. But by focusing on developers, aren't we missing something? Aren't we forgetting that many of the consequences we so detest come from un-informed decisions by people higher in the chain?

In my experience many agile transitions fail by not involving managers in the process. Sure, it is possible to change how your team works with minimal involvement from your manager, but at some point the team is constrained more by management decisions than actual technical practices or even understanding of the product.

I remember a story of a team that was on their path to agile adoption, but could not progress further because management had decided that certain tools should be used. The usual explanations were given: "IT can only support one tool", "we need to harmonize our tool landscape", etc. Whatever the reason for the decision what we can say is that in this case management had a real - and negative - impact on the team's capability to deliver working software.

Sure we can go rogue and use our own tool chain "hidden" from IT and our manager (and many teams have done that), but that is not a long term strategy. Sooner or later we will bump again against a set of decisions that will hinder us from progressing.

I believe we need a new model for Agile adoption. One that includes the managers, leaders, VP- C-level people in our organizations.

It is this belief that has led me to participate in a project to organize a set of conferences focused on the role of leaders and managers. Last year we organized the first of that set of conferences in Helsinki and named it LESS2010. This year we are continuing that project with LESS2011 in Stockholm.

There are many reasons for you or your manager to attend the LESS2011 conference in Stockholm. From the individual speakers (check-out our keynote line up) to the people you will meet. But If I had to name one reason it is this: Agile and Lean adoptions require our managers to understand the new mindset, and without that we are bound to fail. So, get yourself and your manager to LESS2011 and talk to other managers! Share your experiences and questions and come learn from people that have been facing long lasting agile transitions (the kind that requires management involvement)!

You cannot transition to Agile. Stop and just embrace it!

I am writing this blog post to explore a concept. So bear with me, I'll probably ask more questions than I'll answer.

Why do most Agile fail in our companies (or government organizations for that matter)? My view is that we cannot actually transition from a command and control management paradigm to Agile / Complex management paradigm. The reasons are not fully clear to me, but I believe that it has something to do with the fact that we actually (typically) try to use a pre-determined way to make those transitions happen.

Case in point: When we try to move from Waterfall software development to Agile software development, we will typically draw a plan up for the transition with "steps" or "phases". Those "phases" or "steps" will typically be "stable points" in the evolution of our system (the company or organization). However, the Agile / Complex management paradigm assumes, at its core that software work is complex, therefore there is no predictable causality. The consequence of this is that the "steps" or "phases" in between the command and control paradigm and the Agile paradigm cannot themselves be "stable" in the sense that predictability can be recognized.

By following the argument above I'd state that: transitions fail because we try to move from a command and control paradigm to an Agile / Complex paradigm by applying command and control models. It is impossible to 'move orderly to a complex environment'.

What does it mean in practice for us? Well, for starters we cannot "plan" the transition in the same way we tried to plan our waterfall projects in the past. We can, and should have a goal or an idea of where we want to be. But after that we must embrace the new paradigm, or "Adopt the new Philosophy" as Deming put it. There are no intermediate steps between the "old command and control mindset" and the new "complex / agile mindset".

As this is an idea I'm still developing, I'll probably return to this subject and write some more, but in the meanwhile: what do you think? Does this make sense? What did you get from the above?

Photo credit: Marc Soller @ flickr