InfoQ Homepage Self-organizing Team Content on InfoQ
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Don't Worry About Scaling Scrum
Most Scrum adopters have their first doubt in terms of its scalability. Tobias Mayer suggests that before looking into quick solutions for complex problems, adopters should focus on understanding the principles of Scrum. Once the foundation is correctly laid, Scrum will take care of scaling itself.
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Creating The Culture For An Agile Environment
Greg Smith offers an in-depth practical perspective on making your agile transition just as much about culture change as it is about process change.
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What is the Role of a Manager in an Agile Organization?
Your organization is adopting Agile Development and your Managers are trying to find their new role. Prior to the adoption Agile perhaps management was involved in the production specifications and assigned the tasks. Now that teams are self organizing and the stories (instead of specs) come from the product owner, what does management do?
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Managers: Help your Teams Learn Communication Skills
The Agile “self organising team” paradigm requires that team members develop strong interpersonal skills. Now management gains an important role in helping teams learn new ways to communicate and collaborate. This article proposes some strategies for imparting new skills without crushing a team’s growing self-organization, and suggests some sources of helpful material for developing new skills.
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Well Formed Teams: Helping Teams Thrive, not just Survive
What does it take to create a high-performing team? According to Doug Shimp and Samall Hazziez, a "Well Formed Team" exhibits the following characteristics: follow Agile and Lean principles, use an adaptive system with a feedback loop, are focused on the business vision, are passionate and hyper-productive.
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Why Crunch Mode Doesn't Work
Evan Robinson recently posted an article on why the practice of 'crunch time' doesn't work. Despite a century of studies showing that long-term output is maximized near a five-day, 40-hour work week, projects still hit the crunch usually to the detriment of the team. InfoQ looks at why crunch time is still so prevalent in the software industry and, if we know it's bad, why do we still do it?.
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I'm Not Sure What You Heard is What I Thought I Said
Are family celebrations a challenge? You get together to catch up and swap stories, and invariably something gets "taken the wrong way." It's not restricted to families is it? So it's not surprising that the Satir Communication Model jumped the fence from family therapy to team building! J.B. Rainsberger uses an amusing Christmas-at-Walmart anecdote to illustrate its use.
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No More Self-Organizing Teams?
Jim Highsmith has suggested that the term self-organizing team "has outlived its usefulness in the agile community and needs to be replaced". He suggests that Light-Touch Leadership is more appropriate. But does this negate the need for self-organizing teams and the focus on individual team members "doing what it takes" to get things done?
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InfoQ Interview: Jeff Sutherland on "Who's Doing Scrum"
There are over 10,000 Scrum Masters trained, that's a lot of Scrum! Well: Scrum, variants of Scrum, and Scrum-like processes. Are these distinctions important? Jeff Sutherland told us why he thinks it's important to understand a team's level of adoption - not to label it but to continue improvement. He cited the example of organically growing a Scrum team practice-by-practice at Google AdWords.
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The Role Of Leadership - Agile 2007
Mary Poppendieck spoke at Agile 2007 providing an insight into the adaptation of manufacturing management principles in the software development arena.
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Promising Your Way to Agility
In Harvard Business Online this week, Donald L Sull and Charles Spinosa wrote about the practice Promise Based Management - using promised commitments in the organisation to enable organisational agiity, encourage entrepreneurship and stimulate collaboration.
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Predictions: The Changing World of IT Work
In a recent Datamation article, James Maguire noted the challenge of staying employed in an environment in which the rules are continually rewritten. He spoke with Gartner analyst Diane Morello for 5 predictions for those of us thinking about career directions over the next five years.
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Fowler: "Agile Imposition is a Very Red Flag"
Martin Fowler, one of the original creators of the Agile Manifesto in 2001, reflected last week on reports of Agile process being imposed on teams from the outside. He states his reaction succinctly: "Imposing a process on a team is completely opposed to the principles of agile software, and has been since its inception."