Stimulating Success: Agile Managers as Facilitators

Diana Larsen (FutureWorks Consulting, LLC)

Tutorials · Leadership

Tuesday, 10:30, 1 hour 30 minutes | Renaissance West A

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In Agile work environments smart people work in teams to self-organize their work and produce higher quality results faster. Management’s traditional focus on closely monitoring, supervising, controlling, and tracking individuals and their work no longer serves business needs as it once did. Yet these methods don’t eliminate the role of management. What’s left for a manager to do? Plenty! The savvy manager’s focus shifts from controlling work to facilitating it, easing the flow to higher productivity. Facilitative managers perform five new management roles. They promote effective meetings to help team members think together. They manage boundaries for the team. They attend to team membership. They alert the team to potential risks. They champion the team and its decisions with stakeholders outside the team. In this session, we examine the roots of facilitative management, identify ways to leverage current management experience for the five new roles, and consider techniques for facilitative management.

A specialist in the human side of software development, Diana Larsen expands teams’ capabilities to interact, self-organize, and improve project performance. She co-authored Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great (Pragmatic Programmers, 2006) with Esther Derby. Clients come to Diana because of her experience and expertise; they stick with her because of her candor, compassion and courage. She leads group processes for collaborative thinking and planning, as well as guiding teams through project retrospectives. She presents workshops, speaks and writes on self-organizing team development and team leadership, innovation development, leading retrospectives and influencing organizational change. A former board member of the Agile Alliance, Diana works with a wide network of colleagues. She co-founded the International Retrospective Facilitators Gathering and the Agile Open Northwest 2007 conference.