The software development world was turned upside down when the concept of agile teams appeared. Rich Sheridan, founder of Menlo innovation even hoped to “save the American IT industry” with these teams.

Indeed “agile” is a buzzword nowadays, even though some like to point out the weaknesses of this model.

Wayne Turmel is one of them. According to him, agile teams’ managers play a crucial role in the success of the project they lead. The idea of agile management being to focus on small tasks, it is easy for a manager to lose the oversight of the project or to forget about budget constraints.

Those managers have a tendency to go back to working on an operational level rather than keeping some distance and doing their job as coordinators. A consequence of this attitude is that internal communication within the global organisation they belong to deteriorates. This phenomenon is made worse by the lack of structuring meetings and teams spread over more and more locations.

Many organizations are happy to implement those agile teams but few provide them with an efficient set of communication tools. The result is that managers get disconnected from their top management, at a time when top management needs always more information from the base for a flexible governance.

The efficiency of these agile teams is not to be doubted. But let’s make sure they work in a frame where information flows correctly, so that the whole organization can benefit from the agile concept.

Solutions do exist. For example Systeam proposes a new approach which establish an efficient yet flexible communication process, while avoiding the drawbacks of heavy and centralized systems.

Jean-Baptise Wissmann
Systeam

Sources:
"Agile teams, fragile teams" article, Wayne Turmel, 25 Feb 2009, www.management-issues.com
"Agile Software Teams", Rich Sheridan, www.menloinnovations.com