Talking about self-organization at the Berlin DoSE 2015
I will present a talk Why self-organization might not work, and what has that to do with the company organization… in Berlin on November 11 as part of Berlin DoSE – the Berlin Days of Software Engineering.
On the way toward becoming more agile, we often stumble on issues which are sometimes simple in hindsight, but when we are at it, they seem impossible challenges. We might start with an agile team, probably following the Scrum framework and having quite some fun while learning and delivering more value with our colleagues. At a certain point though the expected “hyper productivity” that some folks in the agile world are talking about doesn’t seem to be something achievable at all, and we comfortably think, that must be just marketing, or even the effect of the Chinese Whispers.
We reflect ourselves on it, and we have the courage to look deep and understand why things aren’t going the way they should, we come to learn a lot, and question such as: “By the way, why do we still have Team Leader in a self-organizing team?” or “What is the role of a Tech Lead in a Scrum team?” up to “Why are we still estimating and planning upfront if we are doing agile development?” inevitably pop up. Is it a trust issue is it a cultural problem or is it an organizational design issue?
Maybe the answer, as many times happen in complex situation is simply maybe all of them or neither. Explore together with me what implication these dimension have on the way teams will develop or not, and also how to other companies around the world relate to this challenges, and maybe what can you learn from that…