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By jurvetson

A lot has been written and tested in the agile (and not only) community about self organizing teams: a key practice.

Observing and studying this phenomenon I’ve seen several degrees of self organization: from all to almost nothing.

I think having a different degree of application is good. But what I see is that this degrees is too often defined by the wrong reasons: underestimation of management and inexperience of the team.

Teams are subjected to many different forces: both internal (es. relationship) and external (es. rate of change of requests, for service / products providers). These are degrees of freedom that the team has to cope with. Having a defined method to cope  with some of these forces (es. with time boxing) helps the team to move to an higher level of self organization.

That’s what should lead managers and teams to move among different level of adoption.

PierG