🗂 Agile Q

Seems like a budget luxury, but sure:

In fact you have more time to focus on developing your team because you don’t have to spend so much time trying to figure out who is going to work on what this week. Your team is stable and dedicated, and they are the ones deciding the specifics of what they are working on in any given week.

That frees you up to provide them opportunities to improve their technical skills through identifying resources to help them learn and put them in situations where they can try out new technologies and learn from each other. You can also help you your staff improve their problem solving skills by stepping back and letting them resolve issues that are within their control to solve.

There are going to be situations where your team faces a challenge that is beyond their ability to address. And that’s where the other main thing that development managers do in an Agile setting - address organizational issues that get in the way of their team(s).

You’re in a good position to address those issues because you have visibility into the impact of issues on multiple teams, you’re in a better position in the organization’s hierarchy to address the issues, and you can free up the team to stay focused on work to move their product forward. A key here is to know the balance of standing back when your team can address their own issues and when to step up to help the team address issues beyond their control.

A final thing that you do as a development manager is provide air cover for your team. Keep unnecessary distractions away from your team so that they can focus on the product they’re working on. Providing air cover may be intercepting requests for information from others in your organization and redirecting requests for your team to work on something not related to the outcome they are currently focused on. www.agilealliance.org/agile-qa-…