On the Responsibility of the Agile Line Manager in SAFe®

In the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe®), managers play a crucial role in supporting agile teams and promoting a lean-agile culture. Nevertheless, based on our experience in many Lean-Agile transformations, the topic of the “agile (line) manager” often seems to be fuzzy and sometimes difficult to grasp.

Looking at the SAFe^® implementation roadmap, questions about the role of group and department heads arise at the latest in the “Prepare for the ART launch” step. In that phase, a Leading SAFe^® training for ART stakeholders often invites middle management to hear and learn about Lean-Agile principles and how these principles will affect the way they will manage the system. And as we all know from Edward Demings famous quote: “a system must be managed. It will not manage itself. Left to themselves […] components become selfish […] and thus destroy the system”. Thus, we clearly need answers and starting points to ‘draw a picture’ for the responsibilities of agile line managers.

Clarifying the Role of Agile Managers

Being faced with these kinds of questions in quite a few large-scale Lean-Agile SAFe^® transformations, I would like to share an explanatory approach I have used several times to shed more light on the role of the agile manager. In my experience, we often struggle to sharpen this role, as we have difficulties to nail down its final responsibility within the dual operating system. This is in clear contrast to roles like the Release Train Engineer or the Product Owner e.g. Therefore, summarizing and characterizing the tasks, the to-dos and responsibilities of the different roles by a simple and therefore easy-to-understand expression, helped me a lot to give better answers to the question “what’s the responsibility of agile line managers?”.

Separation of Power: A Core Principle in SAFe^®

As we know from SAFe^®’s core competency “Team and Technical agility”, there are three roles on an agile team making it effective to deliver high quality product increments:

• the Agile Team itself: a cross-functional group of about at max 10 people, ideally staffed with all necessary skills to deliver value
• the Product Owner (PO), who finally decides what should be done and in which priority
• the Scrum Master (SM) or Team Coach who acts as a servant leader to facilitate and support the team in performing these before mentioned tasks

Despite the fact that all of these three roles have quite a few responsibilities (cf. the SAFe^® article on Agile Teams), one could try to summarize the overall responsibilities on Agile Team level by three objective functions:

• maximize the value (driven by the PO)
• maximize flow (fostered by the SM)
• maximize quality (ensured by the Agile team)

Scaling up

If we move away from single team agile development and need to scale, we will form a so-called Agile Release Train (ART): a team of agile teams, bringing together 5-12 agile teams working on the same product(s) and/or service(s). Repeating the exercise just done before, we find again three roles taking care about the objective functions on Agile Release Train level:

• maximize the value on ART level (driven by the Product Management)
• maximize the flow for the release train (responsibility of the Release Train Engineer)
• maximize the quality on ART/product level (ensured by the System Architect)

Moving on, we can see that this pattern is also applicable on Large Solution level e.g. In my experience, this way of explanation provides a rough, but at first glance easy to understand explanation of the roles introduced by the Scaled Agile Framework. But …

What’s the Objective Function of the Agile Line Manager?

I’ve been wondering about that after a 2-hour session with a senior department head interested in more details on how to setup his line management organization in alignment with SAFe^®. Despite of being well prepared for that session and referring to excellent articles like “The Evolving Role of Managers in Lean-Agile Development” out of the Extended SAFe^® guideline, I felt caught out by asking this question to myself.

Recently Michael Broomé has released a new SAFe^® community contribution, nicely summarizing the major responsibilities of people managers in SAFe^®. Having a closer look at the responsibility wheel, one might anticipate that some of the described responsibilities, such as “Promoting Growth” or “Promoting Employee Well-being”, are focusing on the individual employee him-/herself; while others, such as “Strengthening Team Conditions” e.g., try to enhance and optimize the system (the company one is working for) as a whole. Studies of socials networks like the one of Plastrik et al. (2024) imply that social networks can only unfold their power by having an individual value proposition for each of its members (here: each employee), but simultaneously need to provide a collective value proposition for the overall network (here: the company). Sometimes of course, these value propositions can be in misalignment. A simple but obvious example can be the negotiation of an increase in salary.

Aligning Individual and Organizational Goals

I would therefore argue that the objective function of the agile line manager might be best described by:

• minimize the difference between individual and collective value proposition

In doing so, agile line managers can drive an environment of mutual influence, where company goals and individual objectives can be aligned. Thus, managers will not only foster an agile working environment driving business and economic success, but at the same time creating a space where people want and love to work, as they are also promoted as individuals. This also links the traditional hierarchy and the workflow organisation of SAFe^® within the dual operating system: while line managers would typically stay and perform their job in the already established operating system, they will foster and drive a flow-based value stream system with SAFe^®. It is essential to train and explain these concepts to existing managers, as not all of them will and have to adapt a new role within SAFe^®. People or line management is still a very important and not to neglect topic within a Lean and Agile enterprise.

The separation of power principle puts the responsibility for an effective & efficient product development with high quality away from line management to different roles on team and ART level. The important job to balance between individual and collective value proposition stays with agile managers and gets hopefully more attention than in many classical organisations before. Since “Left to themselves […] components become selfish […] and thus destroy the system”.