What's the value proposition of Agilists?

CapitalOne just fired all of their professional Agilists. They state that Product Managers can just take on Agilist responsibilities on top: Why?

The role of Agilists

Many Agilists think that their role is a subset of:

1. Introducing "Agile" ways of working by training, teaching methods and launching teams.
2. Supporting execution by organizing schedules, facilitating events and resolving impediments.
3. Doing managerial tasks such as monitoring and reporting team health, progress and performance.

Even the people doing these three are often different folks:

• Category 1 folks are a temporary role. It's better to contract them on demand: What do you do with them after everyone has been trained and is working in an agile team?
• Category 2 folks could give senior management the impression that "a Scrum Master is just a Junior project assistant with stickies and Sharpies." Self-organized teams shouldn't need them. They are clearly overpaid, and probably not doing their job.
• Category 3 folks are considered redundant by many developers, there are often also complaints that they're stopping developers from doing what really matters - they're contributing to the problem that "Agile" set out to solve.

When an organization sees agilists as defined by the three points above, all I can say: Firing them all is justified. An entire job family is technically designed for "doing efficiently that which shouldn't be done at all" - is redundant.

They don't have a long-term value proposition.

The Value Proposition

There are three pillars to every company: product development, organizational development and technology development. Scrum focuses exclusively on Product development, and SAFe somehow also blends Technology development in. But who develops the organization?

The real role of agilistas 𝘴𝘩𝘰𝘶𝘭𝘥 𝘣𝘦 in organizational development: build organizational capabilities, and improve systemic collaboration and communication.

Resolving delivery impediments is not enough - the organizational system must be ready today for the challenges of tomorrow: New business opportunities arise, existing business models become obsolete, even entire markets collapse. Having the capability to deal with that is critical to company survival. And yet - few agilists are working on this. Their approach is "hope and pray" that no major disruption will occur, and so they walk like lemmings to the cliff.

Learn about the TOP Structure

The failure of "Agile" roles is can be avoided with the TOP Structure: It gives Agilists a clear, indisputable value proposition, and meaning to their work.

And that's the very reason why every Agilist and manager should be familiar with the TOP Structure.