Agile FUD: management oversight

This post is part of a series in which I address Bill Miller’s criticisms of agile. Please read the original post for context. In this post I take on his criticism of the role of documentation in the agile process.


Here is Mr. Miller’s view of management oversight:

The Agile proponents eschew strong management favoring self-organizing teams and trust. People rarely self-organize into a productive team.

Of course we should trust people; most importantly we should only hire people that we believe are trustworthy. However, when trust is advocated to keep management from being informed, involved, and from exercising its authority, that’s anarchy. Good leadership and good management oversight are essential to team and project success. President Reagan put it well when he said, “trust but verify.”

First, let me get this out of the way: Mr. Miller conflates ‘management’ and ‘leadership’, but that’s fodder for another post.
Mr. Miller fundamentally misunderstands agile. In our organization, we have a prioritized roadmap and schedule that upper management actively tracks. However, management doesn’t pretend to be able to tell the teams how to do their day-to-day work in implementing the roadmap. In our organization, management trusts the practitioners much more than in other organizations because every three weeks they can see and touch the functionality that fulfills the roadmap.