The Greedy Manager

Agile Team challenge 1 — How to deal with a manager that doesn’t follow the agile ways

In my previous article, I’ve described, from my own and colleagues’ experience, five common challenges that Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches face on a regular basis in everyday customer environments. Over the coming weeks, I’ll be handling one challenge at a time, starting today.

No doubt, you recognize the following common challenge from your own work environment.

While the team is working on the sprint, a manager storms in, rushes to the desk of one team member, and demands that the team member quickly arranges something for the manager.

This sort of event happens mostly in organizations that are quite new to an agile way of working, but certainly not exclusively.

The question that the Scrum Master or Agile Coach faces, is, how does the team respond to this greedy interruption? Taking the roles of Product Owner, Scrum Master, and development team member into account, what would we want each role to act like, and how do you coach them to do so?

In an environment that has just started to switch from a traditional to a more agile way of working, you are likely to see a developer quietly discussing what is needed with the manager, while the rest…