Is Agile Micromanagement?
I received a recent email from a person that came to one of our Certified Scrum Master public courses a few month ago. Here is what he sent:
I’m getting negative feedback from a senior architect that agile is “driving her crazy” because it’s treating her like she is in Kindergarten. Why do we need to watch everything she does? Why does all her tasks have to be on a backlog? She basically dislikes agile because she’s actually struggling with coding….but the point is interesting – is agile micromanagement? Why is it okay to micromanage their tasks?
This is a common reaction, and it stems from the person’s history around management. She probably had managers that would always breathe down her back and check her every move. After all, she’s a highly paid individual with skills that have made her a senior architect. So, why can’t see just go do her work and everyone let her be?
What’s she’s missing is that things are different in Scrum, the focus is the team not managers nor individuals. Breaking down tasks and tracking them is not for each individual but for the team to see the work and figure out together what they need to do to meet their commitment every Sprint. While there are tasks that she would work on giving her specialization, she cannot assume that others cannot help her on those tasks. In fact, as a team member it would be a good idea for others to understand at least some of her knowledge so that they can help her if she has too many tasks…or have somebody for her to run ideas off of.
The task board, daily standup meetings, are NOT for the ScrumMaster. The ScrumMaster is just the facilitator helping run the meetings efficiently and looking for impediments that the team isn’t seeing for themselves. When you say backlog, I am assuming the Sprint Backlog that contains the tasks and not the Product Backlog. The Product Backlog items should include stories focused on functionality and work that the entire team delivers, not particular to a particular skillset (Dev, QA, Arch, etc.).
If there is a sense of micromanaging, perhaps the ScrumMaster is too focused on tracking the progress of tasks for the team. In other words, he or she is going around and asking for remaining hours and challenging people’s estimates and remaining time. The team is responsible for updating their own tasks, remaining work, and identifying risks, issues and other impediments that is either slowing or stopping the team from making progress. The team should feel just the opposite, empowered, self-organized, but getting support, direction, and other help for others outside the team as needed.
There is another possibility of why she feels micromanaged, she may be uncomfortable in this new environment with Scrum where there is transparency of what is working as well as not working. She may have weaknesses in her technical skills and are afraid to bring those to the surface. For some people, the focus on teamwork and being willing to inspect and adapt personally is something that may be hard because this decay of trust of others over time. Somewhere in her past, she was probably penalized (perhaps in a performance review) for skills that she was lacking or weak in. It may take her some time to open up and build that trust again. By working close with the team, she should over time develop mutual trust and respect for teammates and should be willing to ask for help in the future.
Is Agile Micromanagement?
Not if the team has anything to say about it!
Tags: Agile, management, team