“If they self-organize, what is our role as team leads?”
This is one tough question my managers asked me when I proposed we give eXtreme Programming a try. At the time, this question made me feel very uneasy, and I had a hard time providing some good answers. 15 years later, I think I finally have finally come to terms with the tough issue of management and self-organization.
Last week I helped facilitate Program Increment (PI) Planning for an Agile Release Train (ART) practicing the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe). One impediment for this ART was that although the leadership team ROAMed risks in PI Planning as well as continued to manage the flow of risks/issues using a ROAMing Kanban Board throughout PI execution, there wasn’t enough clarity and alignment around what exactly would Owning a risk look like and what are the expected deliverables/objectives.
There is nothing like a good long run for clear thinking and giving rise to new ideas. This post is a result of my weekend run, and it’s about managers and why it is so hard to impact their mindset in the Agile journey.
The idea originated as a result of my experience working with this company where the managers find it extremely difficult to relate to the newly formed scrum teams and instead keep communicating with their original teams (Dev and QA teams) and at the same time keep complaining about how the “scrum teams” are not accountable for their end-to-end deliveries.
A good way to improve how a team works together is to try to run experiments for collaboration. We’ve listed here a set of experiments you may want to try, depending on where your team is in the journey for better teamwork. Each section has a description, a goal for improvement and then the set of experiments that may help achieving the goal.
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