Self-managed teams

Description

When an agile team implements self-management well, all the internal planning, coordination and integration is run within the team. This can be very effective and results in highly productive teams that run themselves with little external effort needed. In order for the team to decide what they work on as well as how, the team should have a guiding mission and clarity of purpose that motivates and guides their work.

Rationale

This is a fundamental principle when implementing any form of agility.

At scale, this is:

1. Difficult to implement as the size of the development makes it hard for the people involved to understand the whole system.
2. Not attractive because the busyness of the average organisation tends to promote local optimisations to get quick short-term results rather than the global optimisation needed to keep the development sustainable in the long term. This results in:
   • local knowledge silos
   • local technological optimisations
3. Fundamental for functioning scaled agility - as the coordination time increases with the number of people and teams involved in the development, so maximising team self-management reduces the coordination overhead.

Related Principles

• Maximise team empowerment and localised decision making
• Maximise Team autonomy
• Support autonomy with clear boundaries
• Favour Teams with broader Solution Accountability
• Favour Teams with broader Business Domain Competence
• Shared context improves decisions
• Avoid Components
• Leadership supports rather than drives the work
• Technical leaders as coaches, mentors and community leaders
• Product solution design is driven from within development teams
• Self-managed Team of Teams
• Use the Definition of Done as an enabling constraint
• Maximise the Scope of Product Increment
• Create the environment for people to thrive
• Foster a high trust environment
• Maximise engagement