Self organising teams in Agile


Agile talks about self organizing teams at the heart of it. I have always found this to be a great characteristics of agile but achieving it is easier said than done.
For teams / organisations who may be new to Agile and just transitioning to same from a traditional project management structure this may be not so easy to formulate. The structure where manager typically has lot of power / control to a one where the team itself totally control their plans is a journey to make. Teams who have mode to agile already are also seen at times struggling to let go off old styles.
While commune but following are indeed things to do achieve self organising teams:

  • Providing the right guidance to make sure teams understand the true concept of self organizing
  • Building the required trust on team and empowering them to deliver – Letting team take ownership of execution plan
  • Build transparency and strive for highest level of team collaboration
  • Build appetite for failures and missed commitments initially. Let the team find its rhythm. Create environment for their success. Feedback is vital
  • Have managers play a different role – one that is more of mentor and remover of roadblocks
  • For transitioning teams, it is always a good idea to hire an expert / coach. Having someone trained by going through some important certifications is also an option but I recommend the experienced coach approach. The coach can in turn create more champions who can further build upon by doing these agile certifications.
Beauty of agile is that it runs in a manner that if anything is not going right you cannot hide it. Whether it is teams velocity / daily execution OR how they are executing their own plans (their commitments), it is all right in front of everyone. The Scrum board, the burnt down charts, the ceremonies all make it a open and tight system both at same time.
Be good and achieve excellence!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The "Big Heart" leadership

Image
As part of my current role, one thing that has really changed in me is to be able to handle my responsibility towards people with more care. Numerous situations and incidents have helped shape me better to play my role today. Here are few thoughts from my journey over the last few years. Via your feedback/comments, we can learn more from each other. Finding your way : I think it is very important that one find their way of leadership. As you work with your seniors and leaders, you will imbibe some of their ways. At the same time, it is important you also think about how you would have handled a particular situation if you were in that role. What would you do differently or perhaps better? What works with your inherent personality (which will also evolve)? Every leader ends up developing a personal brand, and that brand should relate well to your ways (walk the walk). Handling mistakes and failures: How you handle mistakes and failures, defines you best as a leader. If you are in leade
Read more

Product Management Challenges in Small Sized Companies

Based on my own experience of doing product management for a small sized company over the last couple of years, I feel there are some distinct challenges this type of set up offers. Listed below are top 3 challenges I have come across: Balancing short term wins vs long term product goals:  When you are working for a small sized company which typically is trying to make a mark in the market in terms of getting new customers, renewals and up-sells, there is lot of push to include features what will make a certain customer happy. While that is a perfectly fair thing to expect from product, the problem arises when there are plenty of such requests bombarded at you putting at risk a well thought out plan. What I have found is as Product Managers we tend to react first to this pressure by assuming how can all of this be part of deliverable's and that product cannot respond to numerous custom requests.  But  if you talk to your customer management team, you are going to find out tha
Read more