Functional roles, managers and individual growth in Agile contexts
Join Peter Alfvin, Esther Derby, Christophe Louvion, and Michael Spayd in this moderated panel session as they discuss topics including factors impacting individual and organizational growth after the introduction of Agile practices, how roles and behaviors might need to change, and how compensation models might be affected. Have a topic you would like to suggest for the panel? Email it to the moderator, Rachel Weston, at rweston@rallydev.com.
Sample questions (final list is still being determined):
What factors have most impacted individual growth in your organization or organizations you have worked with since the introduction of Agile practices?
How has the adoption of Agile practices affected functional leadership within organizations?
How do managers’ behaviors change to support with Agile practices?
How do compensation models need to change to support Agile practices?
If you have a question you would like to submit for consideration, please enter it in a review of this submission or email Rachel at rweston@rallydev.com.
Rachel Weston will moderate the session.
Panelists:
Peter Alfvin: For the last three years, Peter has been leading a rollout of Lean Software Development at Xerox, including a large scale Scrum deployment. One of the biggest challenges throughout this transition has been agreeing on the role of the manager and the responsibility for ongoing functional leadership.
Esther Derby: detail coming soon. Or go to http://www.estherderby.com.
Christophe Louvion: After almost killing a fast growing internet startup by formalizing something called waterfall, Christophe had a shower moment as he came across the Agile manifesto and realized his past success in the late 90s / early 00s were built around what is now called the Agile principles. He then fought back the culture he put in place: gates, control and command, blame, status quo, phased development. Step by step, team by team, he won back bottom up the whole organization and created a strong business driven company where efficiency is fueled by empowered teams. While Scrum is a headless process (besides the Scrum Masters), he has come to strongly believe in the idea of strong managers/leaders as defined by the Lean movement (Deming, Scholtes, Poppendieck). After 9 years at the same company, he has just joined a new company where he brings Agile/Lean principles and practices across the organization.
Michael Spayd: Michael has been intensively involved in large-scale Agile adoption efforts since 2001. Almost immediately, a big part of his focus became how to help Agile managers. The issue first arose when his coaching team ran immersions for development teams new to XP. His job as leader was to run education sessions for the middle managers involved to keep them “out of the hair” of the teams so they could develop software. Michael has continued to explore the role of middle manager in Agile adoptions ever since, coaching many teams and their management on Agile effectiveness. From this experience he has developed a set of eight competency areas or domains of the effective Agile manager. Michael believes strongly there is an important role for management in an Agile world, though it is quite different than the traditional role.
The session will be moderated by Rachel Weston with questions compiled through a variety of sources:
Panelist suggestions
Feedback from Agile 2008 reviews
Other feedback as appropriate (Rachel’s email is included above).
The session will start with a brief introduction by each panelist.
Timeboxes for panelist answers will be used to keep the session moving.
If there is time at the end, questions will be elicited from the audience as well.