Wednesday, September 01, 2004

Four Roles for Agile Management

This paper first appeared in the July 2004 edition of The Cutter IT Journal. It replaces Chapter 8 “The Agile Manager’s New Work” from Agile Management for Software Engineering. This new writing, effectively a second edition of the original chapter, incorporates some newer thinking in Statistical Process Control and Six Sigma which first appeared as concepts in Chapter 32 “States of Control and Reducing Variation.”

Abstract

In Agile Management for Software Engineering [Anderson 2003], I introduced the idea that there are four roles for managers of agile projects and that all four roles have to be filled before a software engineering team can reach its agile potential. The names of the four roles were not new - product manager, program manager, project manager, and engineering manager - but their responsibilities were carefully defined to maximize the agile potential of the organization. Although they were described as roles and in theory one manager might be capable of filling all four, the reality is that each of them requires different skills. Hence, there is room for specialization, and it is unlikely that any one person will be good at two or more of the roles.

This article provides a definition of each role and explains why the separation of roles and responsibilities makes sense. The explanation is founded in a combination of management theories for continuous improvement, including the theory of constraints [Goldratt 1984, 1997], statistical process control [Wheeler 1992] and some derivative work in quality assurance by Edwards Deming, all of which provided the underlying theory for Six Sigma.

Download The Four Roles of Agile Management [PDF 2,234KB]