At Modus Cooperandi our principal consultants have been leading and managing agile software development teams for up to 8 years. We’ve developed a unique set of deep and comprehensive techniques for managing effective agile teams. While broad in scope and powerful in implementation, these techniques are founded on very simple, often common sense principles, and are both easy to learn and understand and simple to implement.

Starting with the intellectual property first published in David Anderson’s book, “Agile Management for Software Engineering” our approach expands with newer material adapted from Lean, Deming and CMMI and general management science. Our focus is on culturally sensitive transition to more productive ways of working that deliver superior economic results while developing a happier, more highly motivated workforce.

The Zen of Agile Management now incorporates Anderson’s Recipe for Success: focus on quality; reduce (or limit) work in progress; balance demand against throughput; and prioritize. It introduces concepts such as variability, uncertainty, risk. Providing frameworks and mechanisms to understand the influence of these elements on your specific industry and domain. Allowing your management team to tailor processes, policies and decisions to your own specific situation.

Agile Management teaches managers the simple rules of effective management: how to empower people without losing control; how frame decisions to drive consensus on the team; how to identify policies; how to eliminate bad policies that hurt productivity; and when to implement new policies that improve flow and throughput and enhance productivity.

While new managers in the IT sector are often given basic management training, it generally doesn’t focus on effective management of the software team, rather the focus is on compliance with laws and human resources policies. Training on annual reviews, career development, sexual harassment, respect in the workplace and disciplinary matters is common. Training on how to improve the productivity of software development teams is seldom or never taught. New managers rely on their bosses to coach them and develop them. However, often the bosses have had little or no formal training in effective leadership and management of teams. If they are good at it, it is often an intuitive inherent skill that they struggle to teach to staff.

Zen of Agile Management fills that gap. It teaches light touch techniques that enable effective decision making, appropriate empowerment, objective data-driven quantitative management, how to drive collaboration in knowledge creation, decision making, process innovation and change management without cumbersome bureaucracy and long chains of communication.

And the results have been stunning. With some teams productivity improvements of 200% to 400% have been observed. While lead times have been shrunk by as much as 90%. Imagine being able to bring products to market in 1/10th of the time it currently takes you! Quality improvements of as much as 99% have been observed.

The Zen of Agile Management can give you the skills and tools to develop the agile organizational maturity to deliver 90th percentile industry performance within months of initial engagement. If you want to be better, deliver more value and customer satisfaction, higher quality, and be faster to market, the Zen of Agile Management and its simple and yet extensive techniques will empower your management team with the right skills and knowledge to be truly effective leaders.