Written by: Yaz Tokdemir / (Blog)

Self-organizing teams are at the heart of Agile methodology but building one has never been an easy task.  Wikipedia defines self-organization as “the process where a structure or pattern appears in a system without a central authority or external element imposing it through planning”. Easier said than done for sure.

We all know that giving a team the authority of becoming self-organized is a lot different than the traditional working method of assigning tasks where most people are used to. It takes significant effort and time for transitioning from a traditional team model to a self-organized one— and this process usually doesn’t get accomplished in one session but requires constant communication and training of team members which facilitates this transition process. However, this organizational change is absolutely worth the initial investment and it will pay off at the end. The result will be surprisingly high-quality products made by extremely happy team members. And as you know, everybody wants to see this.

Let’s see how self-organization enhances our agility and what are its benefits

1. Higher speed

Self-organizing teams quickly decide how to meet certain deadlines in product development roadmap. This feature is extremely important especially for startups where company faces loads of change requests from customer. Self-organizing teams ensures a higher development velocity that enables company to respond market fluctuations more rapidly and turn around a product much faster.

2. Extreme agility

It’s common to see major priority changes in Agile especially prior to beginning of the upcoming Sprint (Product Owner usually does this). Self-organized teams have an advantage compared to traditional teams as they can quickly shift gears and move forward without waiting someone’s permission. This will allow development teams to concentrate on critical tasks that have higher value and greater return on investment.

3. Increased quality/customer focus

Instead of just doing what the manager says, self-organized teams tend to focus on what the customer really wants and/or needs. They take customer feedback seriously and feel extremely responsible of building a product that matches these features and metrics. A self-organizing team concentrates on building a product that will satisfy the buyers/users’ needs.

4. Less need for team management

Checking employee statuses, assigning tasks, calculating cost of resources, filling time sheets… All sounds crazy old to me. If you are committed to build Agile teams you should feel the same. A self-organized team is solely responsible of assigning and tracking its work and reporting its own progress.

5. True teams vs hidden managers

You may have heard about “hidden manager” theory. This simple rule indicates that majority of traditionally managed teams can actually have an assigned (not officially) team member as a team-level manager. This person is usually called “go-to guy”. Depending on someone else’s affirmation is completely against the self-organized team theory as self-organized teams understand each other’s roles and tasks far more and rely far less on one’s skill or position in the team.

6. Increased employee satisfaction

It’s a fact that self-organizing team members have higher employee satisfaction. At the end of the day we spend most of our day at the office and it makes total sense to see happier employees by reducing micro-management model such as blindly following orders or waiting manager’s approval before moving forward. Getting team members invested and moving the project forward are keys for happiness at work.

During my agile coaching career, I have witnessed some organizations attempt to create self-organizing teams and find that the team is not held accountable, or management is still telling everyone what to do. It’s not easy to change people’s habit especially if they have been doing it for long time. You just have to keep fine-tuning your processes and it will get easier to find that balance by time. It also requires the right company culture and employees who are ready to accept a new team model which encourages team members to take ownership of tasks and processes.

The following principle from the Agile Manifesto best summarizes what is needed to accomplish self-organized team model:

Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.

In his book “Agile Project Management with Scrum”, Ken Schwaber summarized how we tend to expect others to make decisions that we should be making ourselves:

“Being managed by someone else is totally ingrained in our life and work experience. Parents, teachers, and bosses who teach us to self-manage instead of striving to fulfill their expectations are rare. Why should we expect that when we tell a Team that it is responsible for managing itself, it will know what we are talking about? “Self-management” is just a phrase to them; it isn’t yet something real. A Team requires concrete experience with Scrum before it can truly understand how to manage itself and how to take the responsibility and authority for planning and conducting its own activities. Not only must the ScrumMaster help the Team to acquire this experience, but the Scrum Master must also do so while overcoming his or her own tendencies to manage the Team. Both the ScrumMaster and the Team have to learn anew how to approach the issue of management.”

The 3 Attributes of Self-Organizing Teams

• A self-organizing team is a team where team members get to decide among themselves who does what; the team gets to work on problems and have some power to remove their own blockages. Clearly, there are teams who are more self-organizing than others and teams which have more authority than others.
• In a self-managing team, there is no active day-to-day management of the team. The team is effectively left to manage their own work. To my mind, this is a stronger form of self-organizing.
• A self-directed team is a team which sets its own goals, decides its own objectives and determines its own priorities.

Self-organizing Teams in Scrum

Scrum is still the most popular Agile framework in software development environments. Therefore, it’s extremely important to clearly understand Scrum roles and how to integrate these roles with a self-organizing team model throughout the development lifecycle.

• In self-organizing team model, no one (not even the Scrum Master) tells the Development Team how to turn Product Backlog into Increments of potentially releasable functionality.
• The Scrum Master is the servant leader and serves the Development Team in several ways, including: Coaching the Development Team in self-organization and cross-functionality 
• By the end of the Sprint Planning, the Development Team should be able to explain to the Product Owner and Scrum Master how it intends to work as a self-organizing team to accomplish the Sprint Goal (committed user stories) and create the anticipated Increment.

Conclusion

It’s important to notice that the word “assign” is not used neither in the Agile Manifesto nor the Scrum guide. The word of “assign” is out of Agile world, period. Although, it may seem hard to change an old, established way of doing things at work place – and executives might not be as passionate as you are- but it’s important to address the advantages of having self-organizing teams with a little initial work. It’s proven that self-organizing teams will yield higher quality products, and this means a lot for a “for-profit” organization that makes money selling high quality products in an ever-competitive market.

About the Author:Yaz Tokdemir