Management

Audience

Managers

We help our teams excel.

Stakeholder demos and roadmaps allow managers to see what their teams are producing. But managers need more. They need to know whether their teams are working effectively and how they can help them succeed.

Unlike the other practices in this book, which are aimed at team members, this practice is for managers. It’s primarily for team-level managers, but the ideas can be applied by middle and senior managers as well. In an environment where teams decide for themselves how work will be done (see the “Key Idea: Self-Organizing Teams” sidebar), what do managers do, and how do they help their teams excel?

Measurement-based management doesn’t work.

Most organizations use measurement-based management: gathering metrics, asking for reports, and designing rewards to incentivize the right behavior. It’s a time-honored approach to management that stretches back to the invention of the assembly line.

There’s just one problem. It doesn’t work.

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In this Section

1. Management
   1. Cargo Cult: Maximum Acceleration
   2. Theory X and Theory Y
   3. The Role of Agile Management
   4. Measurement Dysfunction
      1. Stories and story points
      2. Code coverage
      3. Lines of code
      4. Say/do ratio
      5. Defect counts
   5. Why Measurement Dysfunction is Inevitable
   6. Delegatory Management
      1. Make measurements inconsequential
      2. Go to gemba
      3. Ask the team
      4. Define goals and guardrails
         1. Sidebar: An Example: Code Coverage
   7. When Metrics Are Required
   8. Questions
   9. Prerequisites
   10. Indicators
   11. Alternatives and Experiments
   12. Further Reading