Effective Self-organization Workshop

A one-day, hands-on workshop for Agile teams and Agile leaders.

Have you adopted an Agile approach, but the people in your team are still not showing the level of participation and commitment you were hoping for? Decisions-making is still not working right? Leadership is confused? The team’s morale is not taking off? Deadlines are still not met? Then you are not reaping all of the benefits that Agile may bring into your organization.

Attend this workshop to learn through lectures, open discussions and practical exercises, why self-organization is so important, what factors prevent it to happen and how to create an environment that fosters it.

Intended Audience

This workshop provides useful insights to Scrum Masters, Product Owners, Project Managers and CTOs. In general, to anyone who needs to guide a group of people towards a shared goal and, at the same time, wants the group to be as independent as possible when it comes to making decisions and plans.

What we learn helps people understand how to promote self-organization in an effective and useful way, and what prevents it from happening; we also learn specific techniques that can be useful to share information, to deal with conflicts and to create an environment where giving and receiving feedback is easy, therefore promoting constant improvement.

On top of that, we reserve some space that the attendees can use to discuss specific issues they may have.

Overview

We know that self-organization is a critical aspect of every successful Agile project; we also know that it’s based on trust, respect, openness and responsibility. So, why so many teams have such a hard time to fully achieve it?

One reason is that self-organization changes the leader/team dynamics and the teammate/teammate ones. Resistance to this change may arise in different ways and the source is frequently rooted in mental habits, such as a latent blaming culture, confusing guidance and command, fear of taking responsibility or losing status, unconscious agendas.

Another reason is that self-organization requires a radically different way of thinking about the team and about your development process, compared to the industrial (a.k.a. Waterfall) approach that the IT industry as been practicing for so long.

The industrial approach implies that things happen more or less sequentially and that each step is measurable and predictable, but this linear thinking is just inadequate for the kind of products we create and for the complexity that we find in many software development process. In IT, people are interconnected not just by means of their institutional roles (the organizational chart) but also by interactional and influential relationships, which all together create a web of very articulate dynamics.

For self-organization to really happen, these dynamics should be clear and we should be able to understand those factors that block the interaction and commitment of the people involved in our project.

In this workshop we’ll start with looking at what Agile means, at its core, for a development team and then with understanding why self-organization is so valuable.

We’ll proceed with exploring the different ways by which self-organization may manifest itself or be otherwise prevented, intentionally or unintentionally.

The attendees will also be involved in practical, guided exercises that will let them experiment first-hand the concepts presented. Many of these exercises can be used inside their own organization as simple tools to improve the level of commitment and participation of the team.

Benefits

Attendees will come out of this workshop with a deeper understanding of the dynamics that make the difference between an Agile team that works and one that doesn't, as well as practical techniques that team members, managers and coaches can use to improve the level of self-organization in their group.

Some of the key objectives are:

  • Creating team’s cohesion; counteracting division
  • Positioning yourself at your proper guidance level
  • Move out from a latent blaming culture by addressing its causes
  • Dealing with counterproductive collective traits
  • Removing the major roadblocks to self-organization
  • Improve the level of communication, participation, cohesion and commitment in your Agile team
  • Help managers to be facilitators and enablers
  • Help technical teams to work out solutions and make decisions more effectively
  • Handle conflicts more easily
  • Make your organization more productive and proactive

A Note To The Attendees

One of the underlying principles of this workshop (also present in the idea of “cross-functional teams”) is that all people in the Agile organization are interconnected and that all of them contribute to the success of the project.

Therefore, this workshop is designed for anyone involved in an Agile software development project, including: technical team members; team leaders; Scrum Masters; Scrum Product Owners; product managers and project managers.

Greater benefits can be obtained when several people from the same team of company attend this workshop together.

Attendees are expected to have a good understanding of the Agile principles and to have played an active role in a professional Agile software development project.

Agenda

  • The key role of self-organization in the Agile approach
  • Institutional, relational and systemic views of the Agile organization
  • Decisional influence shifts in the Agile organization
  • Guidance vs. command: Meta-, macro- and micro-guidance levels
  • Understanding the manager’s and team’s resistance to self-organization
  • Counteracting blame
  • Effects of the Controlling Parent pattern
  • Unsuspected pitfalls that undermine the team’s cohesion
  • Identifying and addressing counterproductive collective traits
  • Visualizing the team’s alignment with business goals

Format

The nature, contents and dynamics of this workshop require a quiet and controlled environment to yield the better results.

For this reason, this workshop is a public event and is not usually brought in-house.

Upcoming Dates and Locations