Self-Organizing Team

A self-organizing team:

**sets direction for itself;

**design performing units for its work;

**manages (allocation, reallocation, estimation, re-estimation, delivery, rework)and monitors its work;

**executes the work;

**sets its rules and norms to achieve goal;

** has feeling of ownership and commitment;

** is self-driven, pull out work for itself to meet goal;

**requires mentoring and coaching;

** asks lot of questions to understand not only requirements but to understand reasons;

**gives lot of suggestions;

**intra team communication is spread across formal and informal channels;

**continuously enhance skill set;

**has high level of trust among team members; and

**sticks together for long time.

Metrics for a team in agile environment

In agile environment, there is some dilemma about how to measure team’s performance. Yes, it is PERFORMANCE not productivity.  My first advice is not to measure performance of team.  Even then due to old management adage – If You Can't Measure It, You Can't Manage It, HR department still want to measure team, what are the different measure. There are few:


*Consistent delivery of value

*Reducing amount of repeated tasks (simply automating repeating tasks)

*Velocity has upward trend (assuming no tinkering in assigning story points to stories)

*Downward trend in technical debt

*Downward trend in defects (severity might be a consideration apart from number)

*Reduced number of spikes (assuming no new drastic technical requirement)

*Reducing number of intra & inter team issues/challenges (if any)

*SM becoming redundant in team

*Consistent actions on retro items (I have my own doubts on this item)

*Team members are happy

*Customers have only good words to say about team