The Twelve Commandments of Agile – Commandment XI

Here is the Eleventh Commandment:

The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.

- The Twelve Principles of Agile Software, The Agile Manifesto

This begs the question what is a self-organizing team? In the absence of a definition of this term I went Googling for a definition:

When we say an Agile team is self-organizing, we mean that a group of peers has assembled for the purpose of bringing a software development project to completion using one or more of the Agile methodologies. The team members share a goal and a common belief that their work is interdependent and collaboration is the best way to accomplish their goal. Empowered team members’ reduce their dependency on management as they accept accountability, and the team structure places ownership and control close to the core of the work. Rather than having a manager with responsibility for planning, managing and controlling the work, the team members share increasing responsibility for managing their own work and also share responsibility for problem-solving and continuous improvement of their work processes.

- Team Agility: Exploring Self-Organizing Software Development Teams (PDF)

I gather this is all about empowering teams to make their own decisions, and de-emphasing managment by one or more managers.

I found an excellent take on this aspect by Jim Highsmith:

First, I’d like to get away from the idea that agile teams are leaderless and that leadership only revolves around the team depending on the situation (this type of situational leadership does occur, and often, it just does not replace a good leader). There is just too much experience and management literature that shows that good leaders make a big difference. The anarchist wants to eliminate leaders and merely go with situational leadership. However, there is also a large contingent in the agile community that think the right approach is to change the style of leadership, not to eliminate leaders. It’s easy to rail against poor managers or leaders and advocate eliminating them. It’s much harder to work with organizations to change their leadership style to one that supports an agile environment.

- No More Self-Organizing Teams, Jim Highsmith 

Mr. Highsmith goes on to add:

Some advocates of empowerment have been carried away. They forget that in the management literature empowerment is a fancy new term for delegation — delegation of decision-making authority. Does empowerment mean that project teams get to make all decisions related to their project? What if there are five teams working on a project, does each team get to make architectural or development infrastructure decisions independently? Light-Touch Leadership means that decision making is delegated to the lowest level possible and as many decisions as possible are delegated to the team. However, delegating decisions in an organization isn’t a simple task; it requires tremendous thought and some experimentation. To me, Light-Touch conveys the right mix of delegation of decision making to teams while retaining appropriate decision-making authority with the leader or in other parts of the organization

So much for self-organizing teams. I could use my own words but I would express the same sentiments as Mr. Highsmith.

I will add that I have managed many projects using what the Agile Methodists would call a “command and control” approach. The projects were successful; customers were happy; my management was happy; my teams were happy. This indicates that the architecture, requirements and design were adequate if not the best. Also adequate were many other things this commandment does not mention such as test cases, project plans, status reports etc.

So what problem is this commandment trying to solve?