What does it mean to be agile and how do you scale it within your organization?
When it comes to scaling Agile, proper management is crucial.
A core principle of agile is a “self-organized” team, which means that the team decides the best way to work together and how they will accomplish their mission. But collaboration with stakeholders is also an agile principle. Traditional performance management makes these two principles difficult.
Traditional performance management focuses on the individual’s performance as measured by achieving KPIs or OKRs (doesn’t matter), that were decided upon many months in the past. Even more enlightened organizations that conduct performance reviews throughout the year, rely on individual performance without regard to variables beyond the individual’s control.
If you manage one or two teams, this is perhaps workable, though the manager is constantly in a reactive mode, responding to individual tasks or behavior related to desired outcomes. If one wishes to scale agility, this won’t work unless “performance management” is the only job of the manager.
In a truly agile environment, individual performance must be tied to team performance relative to its mission. Of course, the devil is in the details. What is a mission?
Brant Cooper dives into all of this and more.