As a manager, you’ve heard a lot about the benefits of self-organizing teams, but you’re not sure where to start, and you suspect self-organization may lead to chaos. You could just take a leap of faith, set self-organization as a goal and then look for ways to achieve self-organization. But there is another way. We’ll cover self-organization from the bottom up using concrete examples of twelve widely adopted Agile practices: user stories, story points, product owner, product backlog, standup meetings, whole teams, collocation, assignment and estimation of tasks by team members, short iterations, Scrum master, burn-up charts, and retrospectives. You’ll learn how each practice contributes to self-organization by reducing and/or redistributing traditional management activities. These practices also help to reduce the temptation to get wrapped up in the details; provide a framework for delegation, communication and coordination; encourage team ownership, commitment and accountability; and create management artifacts that are appreciated by all.
The inevitable question that results from talking about self-organization is “what does a manager do in an Agile workplace?” We’ll wrap up with a group exercise that not only answers that question but also shows that Agile provides more leverage for managers to use the skills they already have. This is a free event.