Ganesh heads one of the key Products in a Digital Marketing company. He has 4 Managers below him with 10 Scrum Masters and a total team size of 95 people. Two years back they started on an Agile Transformation journey with training and coaching for all the team members, Scrum Masters and Product Owners. Over a period Ganesh has been observing that there is a significant difference in what gets presented to him in the monthly review meetings and the actual ground realities in the teams – they are like ‘Watermelon Metrics’ – all ‘Green’ on the outside, but all ‘Red’ inside. What can Ganesh do to fix this and get more accurate visibility of realistic situations in the teams?
Suggested Solution:
Looks like Ganesh got only the teams, SM & PO trained on Agile and not the Managers and himself. He needs to understand that Agile transformation needs changes at his and Managers’ level as well. Without the understanding of Agile values & principles, probably he is continuing to use the old governance and measurements – same set of metrics and same review mechanisms.
Agile brings greater visibility and transparency, which is a double-edged sword. If Managers are not aware, they can wrongly use this visibility and drive the teams in a wrong way, which can make the teams start hiding information. This is what Ganesh needs to fix – get himself & his Managers trained on what Metrics to look at, what questions to ask and what not to ask and change the mindset of Reviews from traditional command-control mindset to facilitative, helping and removing-impediments mindset. Easier said than done, though.
