Agency: A Paradigm of Personal Responsibility for Agile Teams

Enabling and supporting personal agency is the foundation for creating an agile business culture.

agen·​cy | \ ˈā-jən(t)-sē : a person whose power is exerted for an end to be achieved

Early in my career, our consulting practice’s managing principal circulated a memo titled “The Responsible Person.” The memo outlined the concept that no matter what the role or position — up or down the corporate ladder — we each had the agency to take personal leadership and management for the work we were doing.

In this context, “agency” has recently begun to appear more often in business leaders’ and analysts’ lexicon. It is an essential socio-cultural and generational differentiator, bridging the gap between the old school veteran and boomer command and control, stay in your lane leadership style, and the gig economy’s freelancer individualized task-based project and agile program management.

At the time — in the context of our firm’s business model — the concept was focused on distributing the oversight of project tasks beyond the individual with the Project Manager’s title. The memo was a reminder that we each — no matter our role — had responsibility up and down the project’s org chart to achieve our customers’ successful outcome. That same responsibility extended to our clients for initiation, coordination, and completion of our contractual tasks of research, analysis, design, budget, documentation, communication, and measuring the project’s effectiveness.

As more organizations embrace agile management methods of outcome-based, fast, incremental development, leveraging and empowering individual input, the concept of agency is critical to an effective collaborative and continuous iterative planning process. Agile embraces other new terms like Scrum, Sprints, Kanban, and Lean that are commonplace in agile planning and key to the agile methodology.

Scrum is one of the most used agile management frameworks. Scrum — drawn from the image of rugby players gathered over the footie (ball) — encompasses all development stages, from initial planning to final delivery. The “Scrum Master” oversees the collected individual efforts in 2–6 week efforts, known as sprints. Sprints are designed to minimize project development schedule and applied to almost any business-related context that requires a team effort.

In the agile model, there are daily or weekly, always brief, scrum or standups — short 10–15 minute meetings — used to synchronize individual activities (to do, doing, done), inform the team of progress, and identify challenges or resource needs that have arisen. The Scrum Master oversees, facilitates, and documents the progress using tools like cloud-based Kanban boards to provide transparency across the organization.

The word Kanban refers to a Japanese business concept related to a “just-in-time” process. In practice, the Kanban is a virtual board or table divided into columns that show every project production process flow. As the project evolves, the information contained in the table is updated. The Kanban method improves communication and transparency so that everyone in the organization — not just those on the team — can see the project’s status at any time.

The agile framework emphasizes clear and concise communication, exacting simplicity, and continuous feedback. Beyond the task-based responsibilities , the individual’s agency emphasizes integrity and respect and prioritizes customer satisfaction. This methodology embodies trust between team members and empowers them with agency to accept customer requirements changes, even as late-stage developments.

Agile is often conflated with the Lean Six Sigma methodology in the manufacturing sector. Lean focuses more on standardized process steps, and continuous improvement through post-project lessons learned reviews. Where the Lean method offers similar values, principles, and development practices as the agile development approach, the focus is less on the individual input (and agency) as optimizing the effort of the overall process.

Agile methodologies are typically applied to smaller 6–8 person teams but are scalable to larger groups ranging from 10–20 up to 50 person teams. Larger teams put greater emphasis on individual interactions, community building, and communication. We will likely see agile applied to more extensive cross-functional project-based processes as we gain confidence in virtual meeting environments and online collaboration tools.

Professional services, marketing organizations, and product development teams are embracing agile methodologies for marketing. As management embraces agency in the context of agile, the individual is empowered to lead, even when the task at hand is only a small part of the greater effort. Collaboration, coordination, and communication are the functional elements that make every interdisciplinary attempt succeed. With agency, the individual is not just a cog in a process but an integral component to the larger goal.

Social media and Wiki/Google knowledge immediacy have changed our clients’ expectations for investment, value, and responsiveness. The bar has been raised from cheaper, better, faster — pick two to the concept of free, perfect, and now — and we want all three. Fail fast, rapid prototyping, new product trials, free returns, shared review discounts are all modes of an accelerating go-to-market mentality. Growing respect for the voice of the customer is redefining the importance of agile agency.

Going back to the beginning of my story, about the same time I received that “Responsible Person” memo, I lived in Connecticut, across the street from the old Conde Nast publishing headquarters. One of the pioneers in the now ubiquitous food truck business model, a kind man named Johnnie, parked his “Johnnie’s Dogs” truck on the street in front of my apartment. When I was able, I’d always make a point to get a couple of “dogs to go with the works” with his awesome toppings. However, what stayed with me was not so much the memory of Johnnies’ great food, but an unassuming sign on the side of the truck. The sign read,

“The ten most important 2-letter words: If it is to be, it is up to me!”

If there was ever a perfect tagline for agency in the agile workplace — framing the personal responsibility paradigm — it is in those ten 2-letter words.

Look for more here on Agile marketing in the coming weeks.