Maybe I Don't Completely Suck At My Job After All

One of the more interesting revelations to come out of my business trip last week was a new perspective on my role of Agile Manager. The sibling office that I was visiting had gone Agile a little before we did, and had chosen Scrum as their methodology (where we opted to create our own hybrid, adhering to the principles but mixing up the practices). Hence I was more than a little curious to see how they were doing, first-hand, and learn what issues they were struggling with compared to what was on our plate back home.

Possibly the first "ah ha!" moment came for me when I was asked, several times, just what my role at my company was. The title "Agile Manager" certainly offered little insight, but it did prove to be an effective conversation starter! Since I'd been asked that same question dozens of times "at home", I'd gotten good at providing flip responses like "It means I don't have to do Performance Reviews!" and "It's whatever I feel like doing today!" In this less convivial environment, though, I didn't think that was the best approach to take, which left me kind of stuck for an answer. Stupidly, I ended up providing examples of things I do ("provide coaching to our Feature Leads", "act as a Feature Lead, where needed") rather than thinking in more general terms.

At a group dinner one of the nights, however, I called on my boss to offer up his own testimonial for what the Agile Manager role is, and he put it better than I'd been able to. And, as a follow-up to that, my new companions offered up their own interpretations of what they'd inferred, which helped me refine the vision. What we came up with was something along the lines of, "An advocate for the Feature Teams, but also someone who champions the Agile principles by holding both management's, and the teams', feet to the fire as far as adhering to those principles." Which was better than anything I'd ever come up with!

The other aspect of the revelation is more speculative in nature. Some of the things our partners were struggling with, that we'd already overcome or simply not encountered, seemed to me to be issues that the presence of "an advocate for the Feature Teams, but also someone who champions the Agile principles..." had helped us get past, or avoid outright. This was the moment where I thought, "Hey, maybe I've been doing a more important job than I'd thought." Which could just be a classic case of delusions of grandeur, but it didn't feel that way. I don't know that either my boss or I, when we created the Agile Manager position, were really thinking in those terms. And yet somehow it had morphed into something... well, vital, all on its own. Incremental improvement, indeed!

And of course, now I just have to remember all of this when Performance Review time rolls around in seven months... good thing it's on my blog now, eh, boss!