
An introduction to self-management
Self-management isn’t chaos. It requires management to set guardrails that define the boundaries for team-level actions,
Agile IQ® Score: 0-48
Stage One suggests that you have a number of people focussed on digital transformation, but relative to other organisations, your overall agile capability maturity is likely still fairly low.
A team at this stage of its agile journey is in the Shu stage of Shu Ha Ri.
None
Once a year
Up to 6 months or more
Very low
Delivery in Stage One organisations depends on talented people, but because skills are embedded in specific individuals, a company’s agility isn’t yet scalable and success isn’t repeatable.
Your Agile IQ® score shows that you may have traditional management behaviours in place over guardrails for self-management.
Management by task delegation | move to |
Self-management with set timeboxes, minimum agile roles, potentially releasable increment every Sprint. |
Ad-hoc or waterfall practices | move to |
Cross-functional teams that can deliver outcomes without needing to rely on upstream or downstream teams to provide an increment of value. |
Optimising for utilisation | move to |
100% utilisation doesn't mean people are working on the most valuable thing. Ensure teams are effective at delivering work to a standard level of quality that is "potentially" releasable to userrs and/or stakeholders, not just being 100% utilised. |
Stage One suggests that while there is some agile growth across your company, there may still be some competing priorities holding you back.
Self-organising teams | actions for growth |
Executives and managers must establish and promote guardrails for self-organisation. Agile needs to become the company's operating model. |
Agile IQ® ROI metrics | actions for growth |
Use data, not gut instinct, to make informed decisions on where to focus capability development. |
Improve the transparency of work | actions for growth |
Employ team backlogs over project gantt charts are a good place to start. |
Data on the fastest path to growth, based on other companies' successes and lessons learned, is key to avoid the traps of transformation
Team design | avoid |
Functional, single capability or component teams. |
Self-organisation | avoid |
Autonomous teams. All teams should still have alignment of purpose, function, quality, standards and backlogs. |
Cargo cult | avoid |
Assuming the symbols of agile make teams agile. Only a change in the way teams work will give the company the benefits of agile. |
Issues with agile most often occur in Stage One teams when:
Implement key events and artefacts like the Sprint Backlog, Product Backlog and the Increment of Done by the end of the Sprint.
Start to move away from task delegation, and management of individuals, to using guardrails to set expectations about delivery.
Ensure that someone is accountable for the effectiveness of agile practice and someone is accountable for delivery of value.
If these areas of focus are not attended to, the organisation is not likely to receive the benefits of agile.
Anti-patterns in Stage One all reflect resistance to people changing the way they work, from managers to their teams.
Without changing the way they work, the company will receive none of the benefits of their transformation.
“We take what works” is short hand for “we haven’t changed the way we work”.
Many teams start out by selecting a few key agile practices they either like or they feel best suits their current way of working. Unfortunately, this results in the team not changing their current behaviours. If they don’t change the way they work they won’t get any of the benefits agile can bring.
Visual management for these teams may improve transparency of delivery, but it is unlikely to yield improved productivity or cost savings.
Many feel that the basics of Scrum are too hard because it requires teams to change the way they work. Teams at Stage One are often tempted as a result to just “do Kanban”. These teams then implement the visual management aspect of Kanban, but none of its other practices, including optimising flow, minimising work in-progress, and defining explicit progression criteria. Just implementing these “symbols” of agile gives leadership the false impression that the team is agile.
This is called “Cargo Cult” agile.
Using pragmatism is an excuse not to change. These teams feel that they are serving delivery by selecting the elements of agile that suit their current way of working. Any suggestion they should change is then labelled as being “purist”.
Teams with these behaviours will often relate that delivery will be at risk if they are required to change the way they work.
Many organisations have functional teams. These teams have faster time to delivery as there are no hand-overs to other teams to complete an increment of value and they typically have fewer to no team-to-team dependencies.
Often when single function teams, or capability-based teams, are faced with the change to form cross-funcitonal teams, many will claim:
These claims are made as a form of change resistance.
Establishing guardrails for self-management is the key establishing the groundwork to getting higher productivity and reducing cost savings.
Self-management over traditional task management alone will increase productivity by approximately 10-15% [1].
Self-management isn’t chaos. It requires management to set guardrails that define the boundaries for team-level actions,
Assess capacity each Sprint to understand what the load is on the team versus how much
Curated practices on facilitation best practice by certified Professional Scrum Trainers
Liberating Structures are easy-to-learn microstructures that enhance relational coordination and trust.
What are the minimum set of roles, events, artefacts and timeboxes that are essential for team’
Learn to slice Stories that are unlikely to be completed in the Sprint.
The principles of the Agile Manifesto provide a guide for behaviour and action.
A Retrospective activity to help improve people’s awareness of the Agile Manifesto
Self-management isn’t chaos. It requires management to set guardrails that define the boundaries for team-level actions,
How does the Scrum Master approach management? How can management help the Scrum Master and Scrum
1. Loerakker, Kirsten van de Grift (2015). The effectiveness of self-managed teams and self-leading teams measured in performance , quality of work life and absenteeism. Online at: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/The-effectiveness-of-self-managed-teams-and-teams-%2C-Loerakker-Grift/29e29e3f140987bb91669b2bec6c4587406fe89c
2. Digital.ai (2022) Annual State of Agile Report.