By, Mark McCatty
An important SCRUM principle is the principle of self-organizing team. As opposed to traditional command-and-control style of management, SCRUM utilizes teams more fully. SCRUM offers that today’s workers have much more to offer than just their technical expertise and that the team can deliver greater value when self-organized. By making these teams cross-functional they have the ability to handle all the work tasks within their areas of responsibility. By arranging the teams into self-organized units the teams have the ability to be flexible to respond to obstacles quickly.
There are very measurable team characteristics for determining effectively self-organized teams. These characteristics are:
- Proactively seek work
- Execute work themselves
- Open to learning new things
- Continuously upgrade knowledge and skills
- Deliver tangible results
- Understand their team purpose and mission
- Leverage on cross-functional team expertise
The team with these characteristics benefits and embodies other key principles of SCRUM: Empirical Process Control [transparency, inspection, and adaption] and Collaboration [awareness, articulation, and appropriation]. When combined with self-organization these team characteristics lead to Iterative Development. The Iterative model is much more flexible. It requires a fully engaged self-organized team to deliver successes consistently.
Assess Your Team
To determine where opportunities to develop your SCRUM teams are, assess your current teams on the 7 characteristics listed above. What are the team’s greatest areas of strength? How can those strengths be leveraged more fully? Which areas present the greatest opportunity for improvement? How can those weaker areas be developed and strengthened more fully?
Mark McCatty, Leadership & Team Advisor
Improving Leadership ROI
MMcOnlineTraining.com