I’ve been writing about Agile Management for over 15 years. Along the way, I’ve written (as have many others) how to get Agile practices into a business, how to scale them, how to overcome obstacles to them, and so forth. I’ve also written about how Agile gets co-opted, and a few months ago I wrote about how Agile erodes through workforce attrition and lowered expectations. I’ve never written about how Agile management can self-destruct.
The first thing to go are results-based requirements. Stories are at the very core of Agile management because they are units of result, not effort. When we manage in units of result, we align investment with delivery: we can mark the underlying software asset to market, we can make objective risk assessment and quantify not only mitigation but the value of mitigation. Agile management traffics in objective facts, not subjective opinion.
The discipline to capture requirements as Stories fades for all kinds of reasons. OKRs become soft measures. “So that” justification become tautologies. Labor specialization means that no developer pair, let alone a single person, can complete a Story. Team boundaries become so narrow they’re solving technical rather than business problems. And, you know what, it takes discipline to write requirements in this way.
Whatever the reason, when requirements no longer have fidelity to an outcome, management is back to measuring effort rather than results. And effort is a lousy proxy for results.
The next thing to go is engineering excellence. Agile management implicitly assumes excellence in engineering: in encapsulation, abstraction, simplicity, build, automated testing, and so forth. Once managers stop showing an active interest in engineering discipline, the symbiotic relationship between development and management is severed.
The erosion of engineering discipline is a function - directly or indirectly - of a lapse of management discipline. Whereas a highly-disciplined team decides where code should reside, an undisciplined team negotiates who has to do what work - or more accurately, which team doesn’t have to do what work. This is how architectures get compromised, code ends up in the wrong place, and abstraction layers create more complexity than simplicity.
The loss of engineering excellence is traumatic to management effectiveness. How something is built is a good indicator of the outcomes we can expect. Is the software brittle in production? Expensive to maintain? Does it take forever to get features released? Management has to reinforce expectations, verify that things are being built in the way they’re expecting them to be built, and make changes if they are not. When excellence in engineering is gone, management is no longer able to direct delivery; it is instead at the mercy of engineering.
The third thing to go is active, collaborative management. I’ve previously described what Agile management is and is not, so I’ll not repeat it here. The short version is, Agile management is a very active practice of advancing the understanding of the problem (and solution), protecting the team’s execution, and adjusting the team as a social system for maximum effectiveness. Now, management can check-out and just be scorekeepers even when there is engineering excellence and results-based requirements. But suffice to say, when saddled with crap requirements and becoming a vassal to engineering, management is reduced to the role of passenger. There is no adaptability, no responding to change, beyond adding more tasks to the list as the team surfaces them. Management is reduced to administration.
Agile requires discipline. It also requires tenacity. If management is going to lead, it has to set the expectations for how requirements are defined and how software is created and accept nothing less.
