Agile Leadership

We know Agile is not a silver bullet, that Agile projects aren’t always successful, and adopting Agile across an organisation is hard. We are starting to understand the critical role that Management plays in the success of Agile adoption. It is not enough for an organisation to ‘bolt on’ agile practices to existing management hierarchy and organisational culture, and hope for the best. It is said that we need less management and more leadership. This talk argues the case for both, but a different kind of management, and a different kind of leadership.

Under Management, we discuss the mis-interpretation of ‘command and control’, bridging the 3 gaps between desired outcomes, plans and actions, and we discuss the nature of Strategy.

Under Leadership, we discuss the difference between leadership and management, giving direction, motivation of knowledge workers and Leaders creating Leaders. We will look at models for self-managing organisations, and their pitfalls, and at aligning strategy, budgeting and appraisals for a truly agile organisation.

This talk is aimed at managers and leaders at all levels in organisations adopting Agile, as well as anyone in coaching roles.

Please register on Skills Matter to avoid those gruesome queues:

https://skillsmatter.com/meetups/8923-dpml-march

About Chris Davies

Chris has spent most of his working life in Financial Services as a developer and project manager. He first adopted Agile in 2008 and had immediate success with it, delighting his customers. Further successes followed with different projects and different companies. For some years, he led Agile improvement at an insurance company and introduced an agile governance approach that is the basis of this presentation.

Today, Chris is an agile coach and consultant, helping teams adopt agile practices and improve their performance, and helping companies see the benefits in doing so and the impediments in the way.

This event is sponsored by Deeson:

"We're a digital agency called Deeson. We're on a mission to become Europe's leading open source agency, working with technologies including Drupal, Laravel and Wordpress.

It’s not just technology that we think differently about, we're thinking about the future of work too. We’ve re-designed our company structure and how we work together. This allows us to build permanent distributed agile teams that have long term, direct relationships with clients who want the very best.

We believe people are intrinsically motivated to do great work - we work hard every day to create the best environment possible to do this in.

Find out more about us at http://www.deeson.co.uk/careers ."