Quality Agile Management

Johanna Rothman, known as the "Pragmatic Manager," offers frank advice for your challenging problems. She consults with leaders and teams to help them learn about practical and possible options. They can then decide how to adapt their product development. Her most recent book is "Project Lifecycles: How to Reduce Risks, Release Successful Products, and Increase Agility." See www.jrothman.com for all her books.

  Agile   Quality  

Is your organization using an agile approach (or considering it)? Many people think that change mostly affects the teams and the project and program managers. It’s true—the teams power the changes from the product side of the organization. Even more important though is how managers change with agile approaches. The more management excellence—the more quality in management—the easier it is to use an agile approach.

That requires a change in how managers think about and create the agile culture.

Define culture
If you listen to Seth Godin, he says that culture is “people like us doing things like this.” That might be a good shorthand for how Edgar Schein describes culture:

• How people treat each other (the behavior we encourage and tolerate)
• What people can discuss
• What the organization rewards

Successful agile cultures encourage psychological safety and collaboration. They encourage transparency in the project and product, and across the organization. You might well need to keep product plans secret outside the organization, but be transparent inside the organization. And, an agile culture rewards the team, not the individual.

Take all three together and we realize that being a quality agile manager might be quite different from what other people think great management is.

Let’s first discuss the behavior we …

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