====== How Should We Structure Our Organization As We Move To Agile (Development Manager)? - SSA ======

Or “What is the role of a Staff Development Manager?”

Or "How does the supervisors role change in agile?"

====== Premise ======

When you start working with an agile transformation one recommendation you will often hear is that roles such as Product Owner, Product Manager, Scrum Master, Release Train Engineer etc. should NOT be supervisors as well. There are a couple of reasons for this recommendation:

  - We want to ensure that the people in these named roles are able to dedicate time to the role, both initially to learn the role, but also longer term to completely support their role. Often organizations will see these key roles as part of a person’s “other duties as assigned” since they don’t understand what could possibly take so much time to do. This is a result of inexperience in the new system of delivery. The reality is that most agile transformations are replacing your current system of delivery with a new system of delivery. Many transformations fail because they have not actually worked the new system properly - if you have not allocated the capacity to the new roles, then you have not really embraced the new system. To support the new system, people should not be required to perform multiple roles.
  - We want everyone on the team(s) to be able to participate in the decisions being made without having to worry about what the Product Owner (for example) will do when it comes time to review / reward the person as part of whatever HR performance review process is in place. To put it simply this could create a conflict where, rather than speak up when there is an issue, a team member will hold their own council because of what they think the supervisor will think and do.
  - We want to reduce the number of people between the people that want something and the people that can actually provide that something. As much as possible we want direct communication. After all, every time someone is in the daisy chain of information, there is a risk that information gets lost or distorted, leading to misunderstanding of the need and therefore potential solutions.
  - We want to clearly change the process of working a prioritized backlog from working a push system (your job is to do this) to a pull system (we’ll take the next priority item when we have capacity). A manager can be seen to be pushing commitments rather than have the team make commitments.

In general, agile supports the idea that people on teams are nearly autonomous, self-organizing, and cross-functional. While I am sure there are some companies that are able to do this with the basic roles of agile, most organizations need to put in place some kind of structure to assist people with career development, provide advice, and other traditional management roles.

As you work with larger organizations, or organizations with a traditional managerial approach, or organizations that maintain things like forced ranking systems, or organizations that don’t have visibility to the customer, there is a need to do some level of reorganization, if only to ensure that both supervisors and team members don’t have conflicting interests. The question is “what is the approach we can take to structure the organization?”

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====== Want to Know More? ======

  * Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) (calls the role “Development Manager”) reference to [[https://www.scaledagileframework.com/lean-agile-leaders/|lean agile leaders]]
  * Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) view of [[https://www.scaledagileframework.com/the-evolving-role-of-managers/|evolving role of manager]]
  * Large Scale Scrum (LeSS) on [[https://less.works/less/management/role-of-manager.html|changing role of managers]]
  * Google’s research on the role of management [[https://rework.withgoogle.com/blog/the-evolution-of-project-oxygen/]]

{{tag>FAQ SubjectSpecificArticle organization managers structure people executive developmentmanager}}