Management Onion Layers In Agile Are Here
I was looking around on the job boards when I saw an ad for an “Iteration Manager”:
POSITION SUMMARY – ITERATION MANAGER
The Iteration Manager is responsible for the delivery of the development iterations:
– Scrum certified preferred
– lead daily scrums
– lead quick starts
– ensure team collaboration and iteration goals are met
Seriously? This used to be done on a scrum team by a lead tech or as a rotating role, since the Team was ensuring the outcome of the iteration.
Another colleague and myself had a discussion and predicted this over 5 years ago — that when Agile went through the genesis of capitalization from the task people, that more management would be introduced. It started as the form of “coaches” which were trained task people. What’s scary about this posting is that the Iteration Manager position does not require ANY development experience whatsoever. So I have no idea how the people this posting is trying to hire can do a quick start at all. Seriously, I’ve had my share of non-technical PM’s try to “guide” object design and implementation and you can guess the outcome.
It flabbergasts me that what I thought was the original goal of Agile — to create better software more quickly — now requires extra resources to accomplish this. If your department has three scrum teams, you are seriously going to hire three “Iteration” managers to “ensure collaboration and iteration goals are met”? And has proven to be cost effective?
In the world of top-down, micromanaged Agile I guess this is understandable. The empowerment at places has been taken away from the builders of the software, who are those who know how to do it best, and given to second-tier PM’s in order to provide the right platform to report up. I have been in it. Twice at places I’ve worked the report-up micromanagement requirements became so great that the developers in the scrum master roles couldn’t get any work done, maybe 10% time (laughable) in their IDE under this technique. They would spend all day in Scrum-of-Scrum-of-Scrum meetings, status meetings, and their Agile story tracker preening more than a Vegas showgirl.
Reality: the empowerment really isn’t gone from the developers, it can’t be taken away because they are the ones building. That’s what an iteration is, that’s what Agile is, management of one’s own building. The “Iteration Managers” become impediments, screaming grannies in the back of the car yelling directions through their technical Alzheimer’s at people who are actually driving. Probably it would be frustrating taking this position — how would they report their own time, as “directing” Developer A to replace his vectors with collections?????? Don’t get it.
Wow. What next — Daily Code Managers? One per developer?
All’s ou just really need a good development manager, who is probably sitting there right now; who can take over the place of all these people and trust the task people and let them do what no one else can do: ensure collaboration and iteration goals are met.