Leading Agile Teams
Agile projects require shared leadership and collaboration to be successful, yet many organizations try to use outdated command-and-control approaches.
“We manage property and lead people. If you try to manage people they feel like property”.
This 90 minute presentation exposes the weaknesses of trying to use formal project management on emergent endeavours and outlines the leadership and collaboration based alternatives.
Using humour, analogy, and case studies the limitations of a command-and-control management along with carrot-and-stick motivation approaches for software projects are examined and leadership / empowered teams based options introduced.
An image and graph rich presentation covering:
State of the art PM – 80 years of embellishing a model flawed for knowledge workers
Software Projects – the unique project management challenges
Worker motivation – carrot and stick vs intrinsic
Leadership techniques:
* Modeling desired behaviour
* Creating and communicating a common vision
* Enabling others to act
* Willingness to challenge the status-quo
* Encouraging each other
Agile projects, empowered teams and shared leadership
Recommendations and useful resources
Rather than replacing the project management role with a single project leader role, the emphasis is on empowered teams and shared leadership. Using video clips of Canada Geese flying in V formation the presentation ends with the concepts of: shared goals, mutual support, the role of encouragement, sharing hard tasks, and the hope that life has more geese than turkeys!
Presenter Background:
I hold PMP and PRINCE2 traditional PM qualifications and teach for the PMI. I helped write portions of the current “PMBOK v3 Guide” and believe it should not be used on agile projects. There are many worthy applications for structured project management, yet the average software project is not one of them.