Why Every Leader Should Work in Agile

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Agile   Leadership  

There aren’t many individuals or organizations that still need convincing of the benefits of agile. It is now well established as a mainstream approach to the delivery of project work. Not all projects of course, but for those that benefit from the more adaptive approach, we really haven’t found anything better in the last 20 odd years—despite what some may claim.

But I believe that agile is also so much more than that—or at least, it can be if it is given the chance.

In this article, I want to look at agile as a proving ground for tomorrow’s leaders. That’s something that I believe is an opportunity that many organizations can leverage more than they are.

The nature of agile teams
One of the cornerstones of agile is the idea of self-organized or self-managed teams. That has frequently been misinterpreted as the absence of management, sometimes deliberately by those seeking to detract from agile as an approach.

But in reality, it aligns accountability for completing the work with the people who are doing the work, allowing the team to organize themselves however they believe will be the most effective and efficient.

At the same time, team members have to be able to justify why they chose a certain approach, and explain how their decisions supported the success of the initiative.

Inevitably, some voices on the team are …

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