The ES for #Agile. A nice summary of the entire Agile Management paper submitted recently, and published in the field.

1. © 2016, MurrayCantor.com, All Rights Reserved
Agile Management
Executive Summary
Murray Cantor, Ph.D.
Software has been a crucible of management practice. Since software development requires a
wide range of types of work, from mostly routine to highly innovative, and software is often
delivered into highly volatile environments, no single management solution can fit all needs.
To provide direction for Management that is flexible enough for a variety of work situations,
experts have synthesized many new ideas into the concept of “agile” development, a still-
evolving set of principles and practices that nevertheless offers important lessons for a wide
range of business systems. Part 1 of “Agile Management” discusses the motivations and history
of agile management techniques from a manager’s perspective. Part 2 builds on part 1, providing
specific techniques for building an agile organization.
Agile Management
A good model of an ideal organization is that of a well-designed system, one that is efficient,
responsive, and serves its purpose well. Traditionally, organizations relied on stable, tried-and-
true systems, processes, procedures, and work flows, in order to ship well-understood products
rapidly and efficiently. The goal was to build an organization of lasting value that could
withstand the buffeting of changes in the market.
Today, the pace of external change requires a nimble, or agile, response. To be agile entails the
ability to detect changes in one’s environment, to respond quickly and appropriately, and to
excel in constantly shifting circumstances. In order to efficiently deliver value, the agile manager
must focus on the work, not on the process, and ensure that everyone involved in the work has
the means to sense and react to change. One tenet of the agile movement is that work is best
handled by small, collocated teams that can easily communicate. If the manager does not have
the luxury of several autonomous small teams, then the challenge is to create a large agile team
composed of multiple small agile teams.
Agile project management begins with the realization that the true goal of a business function
is to optimize return on investment by delivering the right functionality when needed. As such,
agile development values individuals and interactions rather than processes and tools; working
software rather than comprehensive documentation; customer collaboration rather than
contract negotiation; and responding to changes rather than following a plan. These principles
address some combination of uncertainty and variation.
Agile Techniques
An abundance of system and organizational research has led to the same insight: if a system
has too much connectivity, the organization suffers from diseconomies of scale and is very
resistant to change (that is, it is stable). On the other hand, an organization that is too
disconnected to respond as a team is also resistant to change. The agile manager, therefore,
must ensure that the organization is coupled enough to learn and react and decoupled enough
to avoid gridlock and diseconomies of scale. The techniques of system modeling and agile
governance may help the agile manager find the happy medium.

2. © 2016, MurrayCantor.com, All Rights Reserved
To consider an organization as a system, a manager needs both static and dynamic operational
views. The static views illustrate what an organization does and how it communicates both
internally and externally. The dynamic views expose how the work flows between the
organizational components. To achieve agility, a manager must pay attention to both.
Some organizations may describe their dynamics as processes that, honed with years of
experience, tell the worker exactly what steps to take to carry out the work. Unfortunately, this
view of work has two drawbacks: Although defined steps are stable, they are not agile. And they
are disempowering.
A key part of agile management is not telling workers what to do but, rather, assigning what
needs to be done. The process is not a set of steps but a clear specification of the work to be
accomplished, with each worker possessing a clear understanding of the work he or she “owns.”
Agile managers must therefore empower workers with the “what” and not the “how”; define the
process in terms of what adds value; have the ability to instrument the workflow to detect and
address the ebb and flow; easily adapt the process if the work products change design; and
encourage appropriate chunking of work such that there is a balance between clear delineation
of responsibility and flexibility for the worker to do his or her best.
Assigning ownership is not enough in setting up an agile organization; to be responsive, an
organization must stay coordinated and aligned, requiring not only clear partitioning of the
effort, but also enough communication so that the team can respond as one. There must be a
common understanding of how decisions are made and by whom. As with any management
process, the key in agile management is to find the right degree of governance, such that the
organization can learn or react.
Similarly, it is important to achieve a balance of empowerment. Too little and the organization
suffers from “cog-in-the machine” syndrome: workers feel stymied, their talents are wasted, and
time to respond is slow because of governance bottlenecks. Too much empowerment and the
organization becomes uncoordinated, with the team following its own goals.
An approach that focuses on the work products, or “artifacts,” achieves several agile
management goals, including providing a means for the right sort of empowerment;
maintaining a focus on value-added work, not on useless activities; providing a means for
measuring and responding to variations in workflow; and enabling governance tuning for
balancing product quality design with responsiveness. Part 2 of this paper details the various
steps that an organization wishing to adopt agile management must follow. The key to success
is to begin at the top of the organization and work down.