There are a variety of jokes or snarky comments made about management.  A lot of them are modern echoes of Industrial era factory practices.  And that is the hard thing – most large corporate management doctrines are merely evolutions of principles established in the industrial era.  That era was characterized by hyper-specialization of jobs so that the companies could achieve economies of scale, from which competitive advantage could be derived.  That, of course, led to a whole system of policies, rules, and even laws that reflected that era.

Of course, competitive advantage from economies of scale is not a focus today.  Business moves too fast.  They key advantages are responsiveness to the changing market and the ability to exploit shorter-lived opportunities.  Even manufacturing processes have evolved to enable faster retooling to serve different markets with the same facility and equipment.  Agile development and DevOps are how the need for business agility gets reflected in IT.

Despite these market dynamics, the people management doctrine for most businesses still looks like an old-school industrial approach.  There is still a push to specialized roles and to do appraisals within a narrow set of rules for that specialty.  The generalization that is intrinsic to agile execution is not valued and corporate structures often limit what lower and middle level managers can do in terms of incenting the behaviors of folks on their teams.  A lot of that is based on the fact that the HR structures are designed to stay within a narrow band of safe and easily defended legal structures so that a pissed-off employee can’t really sue if there is a problem with perceived fairness.

These things are easier to achieve in smaller companies where there is not the same legacy and, frankly, there just isn’t as much sue-able money.  It is naive to not think about these aspects and would be patently unfair to simply slam things for being the way they are.  Things are the way they are for a lot of very good and very complex reasons; some of which are beyond the direct control of the business.

It is solvable, of course.  You can use creative organizational structures that put nominal specialists ‘on assignment’ in other specialty teams.  A popular extension of this is full-on matrix management.  A variation on the matrix is to have people farmed out to project teams in a similar manner to how consulting companies do things.

The common point of these solutions is that they require managers to work together in new ways.  They require managers of managers to encourage good team dynamics for their teams of managers.  They require a lot of communication and interaction among managers and to scattered teams.  Lower-level managers will have to be empowered to invest in and coach their teams into adaptable groups with good team dynamics.  It means the managers will have to be a lot more “hands-on” and leader-like rather than manager-like than they might be used to.

That is a lot harder for all levels of management than scientifically managing a group of theoretically interchangeable specialists.  The odds are that the managers are not trained for leadership skills relative to management skills.  So, as the organization goes Agile, make sure that the investment includes an investment in how to actually manage in an Agile environment.  It really is different.  It really takes an investment.  And it really will eventually take structural change.