Maximise team empowerment and localised decision making

Description

Put the decision authority where the information is richest and most current. This is important to avoid escalations, delegations and information hand-offs.

Team empowerment and localised decision-making are supported by shaping the teams. They are aligned to business services, features and value streams instead of technical components, services or platforms. In addition, ensure that effective empowerment is supported by boundaries that clearly communicate what the team have authority to decide unilaterally (enabling constraints).

Rationale

Team empowerment is one of the core ideas of agile, and it is a well-understood concept for a single team agile. In a multi-team scenario, it is more challenging to implement this principle because of several organisational aspects:

• Local knowledge of teams might structurally limit the empowerment of a team, i.e. they cannot take decisions alone
• The product's architecture might force teams to work in a small part of the system, hence promoting local optimisation. While decision-making should be localised, they should take into account the overall system complexity
• The organisational structure might impede team empowerment. Both the “vertical” structure, i.e. the management system the team belongs to, and the “horizontal” structure, i.e. some other department mandating company-wide rules. As a leader working in an organisation with such complexities, it will be your job to understand what you can change and what you have to lobby for: this requires long-term strategic thinking, cross-organisation relationship building and patience.

The lack of empowerment might cause:

• The presence of much escalation, delayed decisions pending permission, conflict of competencies and priorities are signs teams are not empowered.
• Teams revert to tribalistic behaviour and focus on their local work rather than being motivated by delivering a whole product.
• Suboptimal decision-making caused by reduced contextual information.

Related Principles

• Support autonomy with clear boundaries
• Favour Teams with broader Solution Accountability
• Favour Teams with broader Business Domain Competence
• Self-managed teams
• Organise around value streams
• Leadership supports rather than drives the work
• Shared context improves decisions
• Use the Definition of Done as an enabling constraint