I ask this question to agile leaders working with five or more teams:
What boundaries and empowerments do you set for your self-organizing
teams?
More specifically, are their agile teams free to choose their own tools and
technologies? Can the scrum masters lead agile backlogs the way that worked
for them at one of their previous jobs? Do you have defined quality, security,
compliance, and other criteria that define “production readiness,” or can
teams decide this themselves? Where do you need standards to improve
collaboration with stakeholders and demonstrate KPIs or OKRs to executives?
At StarCIO’s Driving Digital Workshops, we survey participants to tell us whether they lean toward startup-like
self-organizing principles or if they bend toward more enterprise-like
standards. We then ask participants to identify which principles and practices
associated with startups and others more enterprise-like are most important to
their organization’s success.
You’d be surprised what you learn about your organization and team, but one
thing I can share with you is that the results illustrate a wide grey area
between startup and enterprise extremes.
Guiding Self-Organizing Agile Teams
And this begs the question as to how agile leaders define decision-making
authorities across their agile team. Does a product owner have the ultimate
say in backlog priorities even if they consistently
punt on prioritizing tech debt
and security patches? Or maybe you have strict stage gates in place for new
ideas, architecture boards that stimy experimentation and change advisory
boards creating too much friction to agile teams’ velocities?
Again, most agile leaders would agree that the boundary conditions – no/little
decision authority or hard/strict rules are both undesirable.
Defining the Agile Operating Model and Agile Principles
So the question is, what is your agile operating model and how do you define
an agile way of working? Where do you provide hard specifics, and where do you
let teams figure things out with complete autonomy?
These are fundamental areas StarCIO helps clients work through as part of our
agile centers of excellence. The basics are available in previous blog posts and 5NYIke videos where I
outline agile leader roles:
-
Product managers and owners guide teams on markets, customer personas, product visions, roadmaps,
backlog priorities, and requirements. -
Delivery managers
and team leaders are most responsible for hitting release dates and quality,
defining standards, and ensuring teams are happy and successful. -
Program managers,
scrum masters, and
business analysts
each have different responsibilities, from resolving blocks, working on
compliance functions, and ensuring non-functional acceptance criteria are
defined and addressed.
These are just the start. It’s easy to describe agile principles, but not
trivial to do, drive consensus, and develop lightweight and usable
documentation.
And sure, you can buy your way to an agile way of working with a framework to
help you “scale agile.” But does that shoe fit your organization’s culture and
goals?
Or does self-organizing also mean self-defining your agile way of work?
I certainly think so, which is why my company, StarCIO, offers
agile guides
and not frameworks, and why we believe agile leaders must cocreate their agile
centers of excellence.
I’d love to tell you more about creating your agile way of working.
Reach out to me
if you’d like to chat about it.
