The role of Management in Disciplined Agile Value Stream (DAVS)

The first steps into agile were fresh air to me. As a team member, the sense of "freedom" you perceive when going through values and principles, through concepts like self-management or servant leadership makes the role of management somehow blurred. Not contextualizing agile in your organization weakens the role of managers and middle managers and when scaling agile, the process can be a nightmare. In the early stages, it is hard to see that the team needs decision-making guidance while being able to work autonomously.

Since management is one of the factors that directly affects the value stream, let's see what I am referring to as managerial decision-making guidance.

Managers help us understand that we are part of a system

System thinking is the basis to understand any approach to a company. If we simply manage people or even teams, we are losing the holistic perspective of an organization, the fact that there is a relation between its components, and that local optimization doesn't always deliver system-wide improvements. Systems thinking is more about the relationships between the components than the components themselves.

In this context, we basically spend too much time managing people and teams instead of managing value streams. If a value stream starts and ends with the customer why only focusing if teams are properly utilized, doing quality work... In DAVS managers have to expand their view to the entire enterprise and shift focus from utilization to throughput of value. (It helped me reading Goldratt's The Goal to understand the concept of "throughput").

This is how we normally manage our teams:

Below, it is how agile expands including the whole enterprise and beyond teams. This is how we create a value network, focusing on the work no the people doing the work, since as W.E: Deming said: “We trust the people; we don’t trust our system".:

Managers create engagement at all levels

Did you know that the business side of an organization takes for granted that all problems stem from the implementation and support side? The truth is that most times we work in silos and there is distrust in both directions. We need managers in the room who talk the same language as all participants (Joshua Barnes develops this idea in this webinar).

The greatest asset for engagement in DAVS is the MBI (More about MBIs at this link) :

• From a business perspective, all the work defined in an MBI will be funded. MBIs are acknowledged by executives, managers, and teams as the main source for funding, a commitment from all parts to them.
• Since MBIs are containers, they convey all the work needed to develop an item, which means coordination of all areas, departments, and teams involved in them.

As a value stream is the work and not the people doing it, visualizing MBIs helps us think in terms of systems, of flow. Since MBIs are the result of a strategic process they provide clarity of what to align around, which makes all the organization visualize and paddle in one direction.

In this scenario, the intake queue represents the link between business and implementation and support. Managers are in charge of its development.

Managers make all the work visible and this has to do a lot with communication

All organizations have a hierarchy, we have PMOs, middle managers, CEOs... and communication channels are most times pretty defined.

• The only way teams have to achieve the vision of leadership is by being and feeling part of a great system (Nonaka, I.). Managers have to make sure each team's work is visible upstream and downstream, optimizing the ecosystem by making all work visible. It brings team autonomy, encourages positive actions, and improves value streams. It connects the business side of the organization with the implementation and support ones and "the system becomes responsive because there is co-creation" (Steve Tendon). In a way, managers create a safe environment for people contributing to the whole.
• On the business side, all the work to be done needs to be visible so that CEOs and teams share about the capacity of the people that will do the work which will help to allocate efforts and demands. All this creates a community of trust (Steve Tendon). An idealized value stream could become the first starting point for CEOs and program managers to share their perception of the business and engage executives and managers in the same direction.
• Managers will also count on the middle managers, talk with them, start listening to their concerns and challenges. If you need to change culture talk about improving behaviors, creating safety, creating trust and improving collaboration.

Being a manager in a DAVS ecosystem, you develop an active listening to your organization, creating bridges for understanding the whole and feeling part of it.

Which are your thoughts about management in agile?

Thank you for your time!