Jim Highsmith wrote an interesting post about micromanagement. He mentioned Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are good examples of successful product manager micromanagement. I totally agree with that.
He also talks about the Agile process micromanagement. Experiencing both worlds, waterfall and agile as a developer and a manager. I have a strong opinion about it. Agile is all about micromanaging!
Consider these:
- You are coding and someone is talking about your code as you type it (Pair programming).
- Every day you stand up and tell the whole group what you did yesterday and what you will be doing today (Daily Scrum meeting).
- You retrospect about what you did well and what you can improve on (Retrospective)
- You show everybody exactly which task you are working on and how it is progressing (Visible card wall)
- You respect work in progress limits (Kanban WIP limit)
- You make a code commit and let everyone know about it. (Continuous Integration)
The more I think about it, the clear it is to me: Agile is all about micromanagement. The good or bad depend on how people adopt its principles and practices. I have experienced many benefits that come from such micromanagement. In fact, when I look back at all projects I participated on, the projects I consider more successful (people enjoying working, delivered great products and improving the work process) are the ones with lots of micromanagement.
