Secret recipe for building self organizing teams

I authored this short post for as part of Agile chronicles.

Some time back I noticed something odd with an agile team. Team temperature used to be 10 out of 10, and each team member expressed their happiness working on this project.  I was curious to find the secret behind an “always happy team.” A bit of interaction with the team and the ScrumMaster revealed some disturbing secrets.  Here are the key ones:

1. The team is self-organizing, and individuals can pick the story of their choice and deliver at their discretion!!
2. Team has neither time pressure nor delivery timelines

I thought to myself that this is not a self-organizing team, but a directionless team.

As Esther Derby points out, there are several myths and misconceptions about Self-Organizing teams.  I did cover a bit about these myths during my talk at Lean Agile Systems Thinking conference(LAST) in Melbourne, which is available on Youtube (toward the end at 1:03 minutes).

I understand it is not easy to build a self-organizing team, but there are principles enabling leaders in building such agile teams.

One of the best analogies that I have heard so far about self-organizing teams is from Joseph Pelrine.  As Joseph puts it, building self-organizing teams is like preparing soup.  I thought it would be easier for readers to understand the self-organizing concept if I map the soup preparation steps to the self-organizing steps. Yes, soup preparation involves many more steps, but the key ones below would give the clues to readers for further analysis.

Read rest of the article on  : Agile Chronicles

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Measuring Business value in Agile projects

Because the first principle of the Agile Manifesto talks about delivering valuable software to the customer, many agile practitioners are constantly thoughtful of the value in each step of the software-development lifecycle.

At the thirty-thousand-foot level, value creation starts with gathering requirements and continues with backlog creation, backlog grooming, writing user stories, and development, finally ending with integration, deployment, and support. Even with knowledge of all these moving parts, it is common to see organizations only measuring value during development and ignoring the rest of the steps.

What’s the fix? During backlog creation, user stories need to be compared and contrasted in order to promote maximum value delivery. The product owner might need to use different techniques, such as T-shirt sizing, in order to better prioritize the project’s stories.

An alternate approach to measuring the business value of user stories is to use a three-dimensional metric that incorporates complexity, business value, and the ROI. Creating value can often require a change in perspective from the normal project’s tasks and functions. Thinking outside the box, identifying business value before writing the user stories is much better than writing and then trying to evaluate.

Read  the complete article about measuring business value on TechWell

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