Human Resources (HR) in Agile environments presents a unique set of challenges due to the dynamic nature of Agile methodologies. Unlike traditional hierarchical structures, Agile frameworks emphasize flexibility, collaboration, and rapid iteration. In this article we'll look at 3 most common problems and a couple of more general problems for HR when using Agile.
Agile teamwork is highly demanding and requires multiple professional skills as well as soft skills for working together as a team. It is common for companies to assign tasks to employees so the task matches the skill set of the employee, however, this is ineffective and may not bring maximum value to the company.
In Agile teamwork, we focus on the business value we need to create and we only do tasks that are expected to produce an improvement in KPI’s - that means the skills that the team members have must match the value they need to produce whatever it is they have to do. In most cases this skill set should be cross-functional - covering multiple areas under one domain (if it's too broad it will also not work) so there is flexibility to do whatever is needed to increase the KPIs… or the team members have to learn those skills immediately so that the team can still produce tangible value for the customer in 2 weeks or less and measure the result. It’s difficult and costly to find professionals who can match this level of performance, skills, drive, and teamwork.
The solutions are:
- To hire specific Agile roles that are proven to work well in Agile setup. These are Product Owners, Scrum Masters for management and Full-Stack Developers, and Growth Hackers as team members (multi-functional and teamwork-oriented roles). However, these professionals are more rare and costly.
- To train their current team members to become such professionals and to expand their skills. However, not everyone will want that. A lot of employees are comfortable with doing just one thing they know well (even if it doesn't bring value to the company). So you need to correctly incentivize employees.
- To mitigate the problems that arise from the lack of any of these skills (mitigation includes employee rotation, investing in better data quality to cover the loss of speed, hiring external consultants who help cover the lack of skills etc.)
In our 5 week online course about Agile we'll look at couple of successful cases:
1) How to transform a development team from solo work to agile teamwork, which requires to change every team member in the development team
2) How to make a fully functional marketing team with diverse skills and growth hackers on board
You can sign up for the course for free here
If you want to explore other topics the performance review topic might be an easier one. A lot of companies face a problem that it’s difficult to actually measure the impact of each team. Was it marketing or product development that produced the increase in revenue? How can you tell? Which development team produced the value that made the impact on the overall result? It’s a common problem for most companies.
The solution to this problem is to produce small chunks of work (user stories) that can be delivered to customers in 3-5 days. This way we can actually see after which of the deliveries the KPIs started to improve and attribute the improvement to the specific team that produced the delivery.
However there are still challenges with this approach:
1) How to measure the performance of an individual (this is where we try to use OKR’s, but it does not solve the problem completely).
2) How to get the quality of data for the KPI’s - so that you can accurately tell that the improvement came from a specific delivery of features or from a specific ad-set of a campaign (this is solved by batching the users and you need a large number of customers for the data set to be accurate).
In our 5 week online course about Agile we'll look at these solutions:
1) How to use data to measure the performance of teams
2) How to use OKR’s to determine the performance of individuals
The third problem is the matrix structure of management (the solution to this problem is commonly known as the Spotify model). This is a problem every corporation that uses Agile at scale faces. Each team member has 2 bosses:
1) a product owner who manages the scope of the team and is responsible for business results and, therefore, responsible for the work performance of the employee
And 2) The actual boss of the employee - who is responsible for the growth and development of the employee and who also makes the decision to fire or hire the employee, but is not responsible for the product itself and the business results.
This is only a problem that large companies face since in smaller companies this is handled by one person - CEO of the company, but as the company scales it hires professional Product Owners who focus on managing the product and do not make hiring decisions, CEO is focusing on overall company management and usually department directors are the ones responsible for specific employees. So the employee has 2 bosses - the Product Owner and the department director.
What are the challenges:
1) This is something that HR must be able to set up
2) It has to be explained to employees
3) The balance of responsibility has to be set between the 2 managers so that they do not overlap or do not conflict.
The solution is almost always to hire an Agile Coach who helps to set it up and explain it to employees or to learn how Agile works your self in our 5 week online course.
There are more command easier to solve problems for HR when working with Agile. Agile is a highly specific methodology so even small cultural details can cause some turbulences in the teamwork. Some of the most common problems include:
In essence, HR in Agile environments requires a shift from traditional HR practices towards more adaptive, collaborative, and people-centric approaches. It necessitates a deep understanding of Agile principles and a willingness to experiment and iterate on HR processes to support the dynamic needs of Agile teams and organizations. If you want to learn more about how to overcome these challenges, sign up for a 5 week online course about Agile here.
