The new manager is a designer

Since My ScrumMaster training, as an experience designer and manager I've been thinking a lot about the value of those roles. At first I was tempted to think that Scrum meant organizational managers are obsolete. How could they, after all, do anything but obstruct the Agile organization? Well, Agile is onto something there - but if so, it's to expose most companies' failure to value and develop an effective management practice.

I've decided that every manager's job is to create an effective organization. If a manager isn't working today to help the whole organization work smarter with better results than it did yesterday, that manager's company is not deploying its headcount for highest business value.

My first stint as a department manager gave me an established team of programmer/analysts and help desk analysts. As it happened, the company relied on me most to manage projects and tasks the department's members were working on. To the people who reported to me I was an interrupt-managing interface to the rest of the organization.

Something didn't seem right. What of serving a team that is effective and satisfied, proud of their accomplishments and continually learning and growing? What of moving beyond caretaking or task management to finding new ways to add value? It seemed that outside of the budget and annual reviews (to which most employees and managers paid lip service) department management seemed to exist mainly to relieve the administrative burden of higher-level managers.

I went on to do my tour of duty as a consultant. I watched project managers create and shepherd projects that delivered value-generating products. I watched product managers deploy that product to realize its power in the marketplace.

In a seemingly unrelated activity, I've been designing a BPM application in which reporting relationships and organizational structure can be used for various process management purposes. In the the world of workflow, organizational units become active delivery mechanisms of essential resources.

Now all the pieces came together. Project managers deliver products via projects. Product managers deliver revenue via products. And organizational managers deliver effective human systems for deploying expertise, coordination, authority, and responsibility. To do so, managers have to design experiences and interactions.

As it happens, I've been seeing quite a lot of discussion pointing to this very conclusion. Next month Richard Buchanan will speak on management as design in his presentation The Four Orders of Design at the Design Management Institute annual conference.

I'm both a designer and a manager; expect this topic to become one of the main themes here.