Five agile concepts that managers should never ignore

Having practiced agile for some years now, I keep running into situations where managers, with all their good intentions, either misinterpret or fail to understand or do not choose implement certain agile concepts due to various reasons. Although that provides them immediate relief the long term pain only aggravates impacting the outcomes, the team and the managers themselves in different ways that are usually not positive.

Are you a manager? Below are five key concepts that you will hopefully find useful.

1. Start right, because if you don't you will put the entire project or initiative in jeopardy. Going through a short term pain or pressure is sometimes necessary if you wish to avoid long term problems with your project. Managing expectations is the key. If your voice is not being heard by higher ups, get help if you have to. It could be someone with more influence or someone with more experience or may be a mentor or a coach who can help you make a convincing argument and even argue on your behalf. Get your team to appreciate why starting right is important. Ally with them to build a convincing case on what works for you.
2. Adapt or Die. If you don't learn from mistakes you will find it hard to survive. This is applicable for you not just as an individual but also for your team. The teams that do not learn from their mistakes and team members that do not learn from each other often run fire-drills as regular way of working. If they are using Scrum, you will often find symptoms such as planning more than what they can do, or ignoring yesterday's weather, and often pulling in new work when the planned work has not been completed yet. Others may abandon Scrum altogether and start using Kanban without applying WIP limits or even visualizing their workflow. Are you a leader of such a team or teams? Why do you think this is happening?
3. Be transparent. At times there may seem to be a tendency and perhaps even an incentive not to disclose information higher up and letting them know what is really happening in your project. There could be many reasons for this situation, organization-created or self-created or just fabricated. When you look into the reasons, think about what is best for you, best for your team, best for your organization and best for the customer - ideally, all the four should have the same answer. If not, dive deeper and ask why is there a difference? Can you do something to remove the difference? If can't do anything about it, are you and your at the right place doing the right job?
4. Promote collaboration, simplicity and excellence. Agile principles talk about collaboration, simplicity and emphasize technical excellence. The reason is that there is usually nothing more powerful than collaborating to deliver successful outcomes along with technical excellence, that motivates a strong development team. As a manager you carry a ton of influence and responsibility to make this happen.
5. Deliver customer value and team happiness. You have demonstrated your success as a manager when your team is delivering functionality that makes customers happy, it is building in quality into the product, and is proud of its accomplishments. Process may be important but it is not the goal

Good luck!