Tuesday, September 09, 2003

Why Good Managers Still Matter to Agile Development

Johanna Rothman writes in her blog that managers still matter even with agile development processes.

<!—StartFragment—>“But what about managers? Earlier, I said that managers matter too. Here’s why. Good people can triumph over inadequate process or inadequate management. But even the best people with the best process can’t triumph over bad management. Bad management trumps everything else. I’ve worked for bad managers, and I bet you have too, so you’ve seen the damage bad managers can cause.”

This topic is close to my heart. It has a lot to do with why I wrote the book. Bad managers kill software productivity. I recall a conversation I had with the (then) CIO of Sprint PCS - Jerry Batt. We both agreed that management in IT was universally poor on the average. I said I thought it was because enough managers hadn’t been programmers - often getting into a PM track too early in their career and as a result developers didn’t respect them. He replied that he believed the reason that managers were so poor was that too many of them were programmers. We held the same view, agreed on its effect but disagreed on its cause.

I now realize that I was talking about leadership whilst he was (as a trained senior manager) talking about management - target setting, measurement, analysis of feedback, reaction and investment. In Leading Geeks, Paul Glen states that he believes management and leadership cannot be separated with respect to knowledge work. I disagree. I wrote a book about management. He wrote one (primarily) about leadership. Both are important. Both matter. Motivating a team of developers requires both skills.