Agile methods have grown from mostly a bottom-up perspective – individuals and teams becoming agile and educating their peers and leaders on why agile is good and how to do it. The reason for this is that many agile practices focus on the core developer role. They empower this role, and the roles of their peers. Managers and executives who do not understand the characteristics of agile practices may feel threatened, or may not understand how to “lead” their team in this manner. It has the potential for a power struggle between management and the front line workers.

More recently, we are seeing some company executives introducing agile methods top-down. Executives are recognizing agile benefits and want to leverage agile techniques to make their company more customer focused, responsive to customers and improve their customer relationships. However, just as bottom-up methods have the potential of threatening the leaders, a top-down approach has even a greater likelihood of creating a negative reaction among the developers. Anything that attempts to push responsibility, accountability, visibility, exposure and risk to them may cause them to push back. Again, it has the potential to create a struggle between management and the front line workers.

I have compiled some guidelines for executives wishing to fully leverage their development teams whether they are reacting to a bottom-up request for agility or attempting to push agile top-down. Some guidelines are common sense, yet it is surprising how many times they are missed. Other guidelines are a radical departure from what you may be accustomed to – these will take you serious thought, assistance and experimentation to get comfortable with.

An Agile Executive...

On leadership

• Instills a common vision and purpose in all of members of their teams
• Creates a community of trust by empowering their teams and holding them accountable to deliver
• Creates an organizational culture for self-organizing and self-managing teams
• Leads their company by example through implementing agile methods on the organization

On development

• Recognizes that software development is an unpredictable and extraordinarily complex process
• Knows that you cannot predict the cost, schedule AND functionality of a software product
• Believes that software is best implemented by empirical rather than a planned process
• Develops a culture where developers have latitude in working with customers

On organization

• Staffs teams with sufficient dedicated experienced resources to accomplish their objectives
• Removes organizational impediments from their teams to keep them productive
• Places the developer at the focal point of the process giving them control and ownership
• Identifies champions and leverages their peer influence over other team members
• Understands that software development is a human process that is different in every organization and makes it difficult to plan organizational structure

On change

• Recognizes that transforming to an agile company is hard and requires patience and guidance
• Implements organizational and process changes piecemeal, taking small steps of success
• Focuses on ongoing repair rather than on forecasting and anticipation
• Knows that change upsets an organization and that positive change comes from consensus
• Eradicates bad attitudes and other negative behaviors before they multiply

On success

• Believes that the true measure of progress is working software and customer satisfaction
• Compensates their teams (and outstanding individuals) for successful projects