Disturbance Strategy to Achieve Self Organization

What is Self Organization Self-organization is a process where a form of order or coordination arises out of various interactions between the team members who are initially individual contributors or disordered or part of a disordered system

Assume that you have won a deal and it has agreed upon to execute the project using scrum methodology

What do we need to execute a project ?

Infrastructure Self-Organized people with domain and technical skills Customer support and prioritized product back log Organizational and management support Processes and tools.

Infrastructure can be procured if needed and we can get people who are skilled in the domain, technology etc.. We expect organization and management support as deals would generally be accepted inline with organization’s strategic move. What about Self – Organized people..Can we recruit self – Organized techies ? We can recruit techies however we have to groom them to be self organized.

Coming to the project execution through scrum

Scrum teams have freedom at their hand within confined project boundaries Right from committing to the sprint goal to delivering it, everything is activly driven by scrum team and scrum master will act as enabler.

Why Freedom ? To enable trust

The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams. Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done. Reference :

Strategy To Induct Self Organization:

Disturbance: Is any activity that would intervene with your team and would have a positive or negative impact towards its goal or vision.

We need to come up with a strategy to apply appropriate teaser at appropriate time to change the direction of team’s execution towards a more productive way.

Disturb Observe Conclude

When can we disturb the team? How frequently can we disturb ? What would be the most likely areas of disturbances ?

Teasers applied to one team may not be apt to other because of people dynamics, project dynamics, maturity levels of team members in terms of agile adoption etc..However we can find common categories where in we can apply the teasers.

Process teasers People teasers Productivity or performance evaluation teasers Dependency teasers Organizational (need) teasers

Example area to apply process teasers. Scrum team is reporting the status to scrum master on a daily scrum – Process correction required Sample disturbance: Disturb the team being yourself as scrum master by not attending a daily scrum or by making one of the scrum team member as scrum master. Expected behavior: Scrum team members need to provide update to their team not the scrum master about their work.

Example area to apply productivity teasers. Team’s velocity graph have huge spikes – Possibility of story point inflation and correction required Sample disturbance: If entire team is not participating in the estimate Disturb the team and ensure entire team participates in the estimation. Expected behavior: Velocity is just a measure of team’s rate of progress. And it’s not hard and fast that each iteration should definitely show an increase in its value over each iteration. However story point inflation needs to be avoided while estimation, trust factor needs a revisit.

Example area to apply dependency teasers. product owner is not available for scrum team members for a couple of days. Sample disturbance: Let the BA be the PO for these days Expected behavior: Responsibility of defining and prioritizing the product backlog cannot be delegated, though the physical work of writing the stories is delegated.

Example area to apply Organizational Need teasers. As part of the bottom-up approach of scrum adoption at organization level assume that your organization would like to have 50 of their senior analysts trained on agile practices Sample disturbance: Responding to organizational requirement you have expanded your 6 member scrum team to 7-member one with an additional senior analyst. Expected behavior: The senior analyst’s knowledge and experience needs to amplify team’s knowledge and team’s scrum practices need to amplify the senior analyst’s scrum knowledge.

Example area to apply People teasers. Continuous interaction and continuous involvement from all the scrum team members is not happening –Apply people teaser Sample disturbance: Make the unspeakable – Speak. Ask updates regarding other team members work. Let non-speakers pair program with speakers. Let hyper testers work with silent coders Repeat this combinations until every one is comfortable speaking with all others transparently. Expected behavior: We cannot have engineer’s sit in their cubicle and doing their coding / design /testing job being in their own detached world. We need to have continuous interaction and involvement from all team members.

Key Points 1)As the team realizes that it has the complete liberty to do whatever it feels necessary to reach the iteration goal, a sense of liberation and enablement occurs.Ensure the team feels the freedom. 2)Once you throw and idea..the idea is theirs. 3)Disturbing is not your goal..your first goal is identifying the behaviour of the team and identifying how the team is living with your disturbance. Your second goal would be coming up with a new teaser based on your observations and. 4)come up with a strategy to apply appropriate teaser at appropriate time to change the direction of team’s execution towards a more productive way.

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