A functional manager’s job breaks apart into three handy headings:
- Cultivate Discipline
- Leverage Discipline
- Employee At Large
You Cultivate the Discipline
This is the most important part of your job. You’re supposed to look after the discipline–make sure it is as strong as possible.
Unfortunately, this most important aspect of your job is often strangled by the two less important headings that I will get into below.
Cultivating discipline breaks down into these subheadings:
- Define the discipline distinctly. That is, look after the elements of the discipline that are unique to it.
- Identify “bright spots” in the organization and try to grow them. Much of this learning comes from one-on-ones.
- Identify valuable wisdom in the general industry, and try to bring it in.
- Create your own signature systems based on all received wisdom and your own needs.
- Recognize and champion better practices, techniques, technology, and tools.
- Identify function-wide release criteria (or Definition of Done elements)–a general checklist of recommendations and requirements for release.
- Define the discipline as part of a broader development practice.
- Collect better practices for planning.
- Collect better practices for estimating.
- Collect better practices for forming high-performing teams.
- Collect better practices for bug management.
- Disseminate all received wisdom.
- Provide trainings for discipline members.
- Provide conferences for discipline members.
- Provide documentation.
- As much as possible, be a living reference of the discipline.
- Evangelize the discipline.
- Break down barriers within the discipline group.
- Break down barriers external to the discipline group.
- Optimally staff the discipline.
- Develop a permanent recruiting machine.
- Hire high-quality, well-matched developers.
- Grow existing staff by work assignment.
- Grow existing staff by direct feedback.
- Evaluate existing staff using 360 degree reviews.
- Grow existing staff by routine coaching.
- Grow existing staff by frequent performance reviews incorporating actionable (specific, timely, doable) and broadly collected feedback.
- Guide underperforming staff to better performance or a better fit elsewhere.
Of course, all of that discipline will only benefit the organization if its power is brought to bear on the opportunities facing it.
You Leverage the Discipline
When there are problems you may find people commonly reach out to functional managers as a quick fix. Often, people ask you to do what your directs and their scrum teams are ultimately tasked with doing. Immediate needs often starve the long term cultivation efforts.
If the discipline and organization is operating well then this element of your job shouldn’t take much time. It is the actual developers, after all, that really deliver on the promises of the discipline. You should:
- Staff funded projects.
- Penetrate the discipline. For example, facilitate ad-hoc connections into the discipline. You should know a lot about who is doing what inside the discipline so you can help connect people-with-needs to people-with-know-how. You may be unable to solve problems completely this way because developers in the discipline are all assigned somewhere. It often takes the cooperation of the Product Owner on the other side of the connection in order for problems to really be solved by making connections.
- Advocate improving existing projects and eliminating debt. Your directs may work on many different Scrum Teams. Utilize well-thought-out questions during one-on-ones to pick the minds of the developers themselves. As you identify potential improvements train them on how to get those improvements on their product’s backlog. If they need help facilitate that discussion with the Product Owner.
- Insist on low bug-counts. Again, with many scrum teams you can’t have detailed knowledge about each one’s bug backlog. You can look at the counts in the bug tracker and counsel with your people. This is often effective on its own. Understand your prerogative to insist on more time for bugs.
- Insist on availability. Follow a pattern similar to how you deal with bugs. Train your people to care about uptime (which they largely care about already) and let them do the actual work on the uptime issues. Real solutions require that the team own the problem. Monitor the uptime issues and train them on the resources they have to pursue the issue, including yourself.
- Insist on definition of done. The discipline has its own issues that ought to trickle into every story’s definition of done. I18n, for example. Of course, when a potential acceptance criteria doesn’t apply then the team can ignore it on a story by story basis.
You Are an Employee At-Large
You’re still an employee. There are several elements of your job that simply come by virtue of being employed:
- Participate on other teams. For example, a triage or 5 whys team; a committee for Manager Training.
- Mentor others. I mean this in both the informal neighborly-advice way that many people use it, and the formal Mentoring relationship as defined by Manager Tools.
- Penetrate the org. That is, know how the system works and help people work it. This can be a full-time job itself.
You Must Cultivate Cultivation
That’s the job as I see it. The biggest challenge I’ve seen myself is that Leveraging and Employee At Large activities often smother Cultivation activities. Your mantra must be “Cultivate Cultivation.”
