Getting away from the need to internalize project decisions and problems, and instead being the conduit of such things (the “passive conduit”) from the team to the right people can be an effective practice, but on most projects, the responsibility doesn’t stop until action is taken on all of these things. The Agile PM - especially in organizations where Agile is new - often also fills the role of ‘obstacle remover’ and ‘change agent’ and should do whatever will help the group understand how they can operate differently to succeed.
Some examples:
- The team doesn’t have the infrastructure it needs to be effective (perhaps no continuous integration, or the enterprise-approved toolset will take months to get set up/be available)
- Passive Conduit:
- Escalate the issue to program leadership and anyone who can solve the problem
- Active Conduit:
- Escalate the issue to program leadership and anyone who can solve the problem
- Investigate possible short-term alternatives and get something running for the team (get an open source/free CI server installed and running on the dev servers, get team to implement its own CI)
- Find people in other parts of the company or in the community that have solved this problem
- Include team members with relevant skills in identifying/implementing a solution
- Work with program leadership and support groups to help them understand the challenges and risks the team faces, and show them the measures you have taken for the short term
- The team has been asked to wait for some major architectural or design effort that will influence upcoming work, lest they should waste effort!
- Passive Conduit:
- Escalate the block to program leadership (technical, business (through Product Owner), etc.) and set expectations about the impact of doing BRUF/BDUF/B*UF efforts
- Active Conduit:
- Escalate the block to program leadership (technical, business (through Product Owner), etc.) and set expectations about the impact of doing BRUF/BDUF/B*UF efforts
- Spend time with the architecture and/or design groups in question. Provide training in Agile methods, and coach them in how to evolve overall architecture and design while making actual progress. Facilitate the creation of stories that can be implemented based on what is already known in such a way that changes can be easily incorporated later. Include team members in coming up with such solutions
The Passive Conduit focuses on escalation and communication of the issue — The Active Conduit also communicates and esclatates, but goes further to focus on facilitating and driving the resolution when appropriate.
Does your team have issues? Who knows about them? What have you done to help solve them?
