Self-Organizing Team
One of the challenges for leaders and mangers in agile development method is to prepare self-organizing teams. Scrum Masters and agile coaches should be aware of any influence on their teams to focus the creativity and productivity of a self-organizing team. Even the Agile Manifesto includes self-organizing teams as a key principle, saying that “the best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams”. If team is mature enough to make decisions like who should pick what task, who will do the design, testing and reviews, then team’s efficiency increases.
As part of deciding how best to achieve the goal, some teams decided that all key technical decisions should be made by one person on the team. On the other hand, teams decide to split the responsibility for technical decisions along technical boundaries: Our experts made decisions based on their capabilities and sometimes we do the technical discussions to come up with common understanding.
Not every agile team will choose to organize themselves in the same way. We cannot just put nine random individuals together, tell them to self-organize, and expect anything good to result. Self-organizing doesn’t mean the team gets to decide what goal they chase or even about the choosing team members, who should be in team and what should be the team size. But some team can decide their skill requirement and size of the team depending upon the nature of project. Self-organization doesn’t mean anyone can design. For perfect design team need design expert. It does not mean letting people do whatever they want to do. Management establishes enough checkpoints to prevent ambiguity and tension from turning into chaos. At the same time management avoids the rigid control that impacts creativity and productivity.
There should be the mix of technical skills and balance domain knowledge on Agile team. Apart from this Agile team should seek diversity within team itself like how individual think about problems, how they make decisions, how much information they need before making decision and so on. A second common objection is that the team is too passive to self-organize and will instead look to its Scrum Master or Product Owner to lead and make important decisions for them. If this happens, make sure team members know that the Scrum Master’s job is to support them, not to make decisions for them.
Qualities of Self-Organizing Team:
- Ownership
- Motivation
- Teamwork
- Coaching
- Trust and respect
- Commitment
- Collaboration
- Competency
- Continuity
In general, a self-organizing team is one in which the team is given more autonomy, rather than being told exactly what to do and how to do it. More decisions, particularly those that affect the team, are made by the team, rather than anyone outside the team.
