People Management: A Goal-Driven Approach

 

This posting, the latest in our series focused on a disciplined agile approach to people management, overviews the activities associated with it. The Disciplined Agile (DA) toolkit promotes an adaptive, context-sensitive strategy.  DA does this via its goal-driven approach that indicates the process factors you need to consider, a range of techniques or strategies for you to address each process factor, and the advantages and disadvantages of each technique.  In this blog posting we present the goal diagram for the People Management process blade and overview its process factors.

The following process goal diagram overviews the potential activities associated with disciplined agile people management. These activities are performed by, or at least supported by, your people management (often called a human resource) team.

The process factors that you need to consider for people management are:

1. Manage staff.  Your organization needs to perform basic functions such as hiring (onboarding) staff, letting people go (offboarding), promoting, demoting, transferring them and providing benefits to people.
2. Organize IT.  What is your strategy for organizing your IT department?  Do you do it by job function (e.g. have a business analyst group, a project management group, and so on), by geography (e.g. a North American IT department, a European IT department, and so on), by business division (e.g. an IT group to support Retail banking, an IT group to support brokerage, and so on), or by value creation (e.g. an IT group to support a specific product line).  Or combinations thereof?
3. Guide careers.  Your organization should support the career aspirations of its staff, providing opportunities to people and supporting their efforts to achieve their goals.
4. Staff IT.  You need to identify, and plan for, your organization’s staffing needs.  This includes succession planning for senior IT people, critical technical positions (yes, that includes all those legacy COBOL programmer positions), and other critical roles such as product owners.  This also includes staff capacity planning/forecasting as well as determining your mix of full time employees (FTEs) and contractors.
5. Reward staff.  There are many ways that people and teams can be rewarded, including base pay, bonuses, and non-monetary rewards.  For some people in some organizations their pay is publicly known (for example, in Canada public employees who make over a certain amount have their salaries published annually) whereas for most people their remuneration strategy is private.
6. Form teams.  There are different types of teams that can be formed to address IT functions, each of which are (self) organized differently.
7. Evolve teams.  Team membership and structure evolve over time, and there are several common strategies that enable this.  Some teams are ad-hoc, forming when their needed and disbanding when they’re not, with little or no management intervention.  Sometimes people are assigned to teams and sometimes people volunteer to be on a team.  Some organizations are adhocracies where teams are self-organizing and have defined strategies for enabling collaboration and communication between teams.
8. Govern people management.  Your people management activities, just like all other activities, should be governed effectively.  An important aspect of people management governance is the definition of roles and responsibilities (see Roles on DAD Teams and DA Roles at Scale for suggestions), as is the usual measurement and monitoring activities.

For more details, please read the article People Management.