Nurturing the self-organizing team

September 2, 2008 by Artem

Scrum is a team empowerment framework. Scrum is an agile product management process that is based on the clear separation of what's and how's - Product Owner is responsible for what's, the development team is responsible for how's. This clear separation puts big bet on the team's ability to self-organize and figure out what exactly process and practices are best for it.

In my practice I've seen teams that gelled successfully, communicated with their customers frequently and were indeed able to self organize to whatever was needed for the frequent delivery of good software wanted by the customers. However, I also experienced teams that are struggling despite the credit from management. Their Product Owner (or Product Owner teams) were able to fix the product priorities for a sprint, they did explicitly tell that they want less features and more quality, they did allow their teams to work on architecture as much as they needed and still the quality wasn't on par with the expectations. The testers tested according to the scripts (and not according to what the user might want do), POs often were able to find obvious bugs during the sprint review demos, etc. Despite all the trust credit these teams just didn't self-organize.

Self-organization rarely happens on its own. Self-organization requires a common goal, boundaries and knowledge of some simple rules. Learning the self-organized team behaviors takes time and determination. The whole team has to walk a path from rookie to an expert and needs different styles of support from directing to delegating. A good Scrum Master or decent Agile coach rarely if ever tells the team to do whatever they want from the day one of the Agile adoption. Learning the new way of working takes time and in the very beginning the amount of guidance might be even bigger, than in the world of command'and'control. Coach just has to be clear that it is temporary and is needed only because the team is new to the process.

Scrum is an excellent process that suites many teams and by empowering them can lead to the truly amazing results even under the tough conditions. However, the ability to utilize high level of empowerment and self-organization isn't something to be developed overnight. It is something to nurture and to care about.

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