Making Agile Transformations Real With Middle Management, part 1
Photo by gfpeck
Scaling an agile transformation beyond a few teams requires engaging middle management. Yet a common issue arises: agile coaches sideline middle management in agile transformations and tell them to simply trust the teams. Managers are not clear about their role in the transformation or how to do their jobs.
To make agile stick, middle managers need practical strategies for working with their teams, peers, and leaders, and agile coaches need to see them as partners in the transformation.
Middle management is crucial to the success of an agile transformation.
Middle Management in Agile Transformation is Key
Senior leaders kick off an agile transformation with the vision. But someone else translates these big ideas into new behaviors for teams. Agile coaches are often the ones who make abstract transformation goals feel tangible. They help people understand how to use new ways of working in their daily tasks.
But let’s be real—agile transformations don’t happen in a vacuum. There are competing priorities, resource constraints, and sometimes political landmines to navigate. These are the realities that can make or break an agile transformation.
Agile coaches discover these realities as they work. They face limits in what they can do, yet middle managers navigate this terrain all the time. In technology organizations, managers often have multiple accountabilities and must use their authority as a resource, not a weapon.
At a large transportation company, several teams were experiencing delays with a third-party vendor. This vendor team supported many other companies. Their unpredictable delivery slowed down the teams’ progress, especially if they needed support during their sprints.
The agile coach recognized the issue and helped teams improve their planning. They encouraged the teams to forecast their needs and communicate them earlier. While this helped, the vendor team’s backlog remained long. Non-urgent work piled up, and when true emergencies arose, it was hard to get them escalated quickly.
That’s when a middle manager stepped in to tackle the issue with buy-in from their boss and peers. First, the manager worked with both the vendor and teams to establish service-level agreements (SLAs). These SLAs set clear expectations for response times, delivery windows, and how long it would take for different types of requests to be fulfilled. This made it easier for teams to plan around vendor support.
Also, the manager introduced a formal escalation path for urgent issues. This process allowed teams to push critical requests to the front of the queue when necessary. The escalation path ensured that truly urgent tasks got prioritized while allowing the vendor team to focus on their backlog.
The agile coach had improved team-level planning and reduced the number of urgent last-minute requests. The manager’s intervention with SLAs and an escalation process helped tackle the issue further. By clarifying expectations with the vendor and teams, the manager made sure that teams could rely on the vendor’s support.
Because of their positional authority, middle management can solve real problems that teams are facing every day in agile transformations.
