Mike Cottmeyer of Pillar Technology wrote an excellent post, posing a question: Why wouldn’t a management team embrace a set of methodologies so focused on giving them what they need the most?

I took a few minutes to digest the question and then compared it to my prior experiences implementing Agile on a management level.  Though I have seen the desire of a management team to embrace Agile, allowing more value to be delivered, I also saw them take pause and throw up roadblocks. At the moment they believed the top-down command and control structure would be weakened by bottom-up empowered teams, delivering value suddenly didn’t appear to be as important. Though I appreciate the necessity of a management team to provide strategic vision, I believe tactical implementation should be left to those outside the group. The hierarchy of wants, not needs, for the management team differs from the implementation team, if we want to admit it or not.

The key question asked is why wouldn’t a management team embrace a set of methodologies so focused on giving them what they need the most? My answer is I believe it is because delivering value is NOT necessarily what they WANT, it is what they NEED.

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