Evan Leonard on "Enabling Self-Organization"

Self-organizing teams are one of the core principles of Agile software development. However, when it comes to exactly how to self-organize, Agile is uncomfortably silent.

Scrum states that team must hold a Sprint Retrospective but give little concrete advice about what a good retrospective looks like and what its outputs should be. As a result, many teams let retrospectives fall by the way side, failing to capitalize on opportunities for learning and optimization.

Holacracy, an agile-like practice for the whole organization, provides clear instructions for self-organization. Holacratic practices like Integrative Decision-Making, Named Roles and Accountabilities, Governance Meetings and Double Linking complement existing Agile practices. They also have the potential to extend the Agile mindset out from Engineering Teams to the core of an organization.

For more information about Holacracy please visit:

http://www.holacracy.org

We'll be giving away one free registration for a Rally Certified ScrumMaster or Certified Scrum Product Owner training in Boulder. Be sure to drop your contact info in the drawing box before the meeting. Travel and lodging is not included. You must be present to win.

See here and here for more course and date details.

The August 2009 sponsor is Rally Software. Rally Software helps organizations perfect the art of software development through Agile and Lean practices. Agile development practices are quickly becoming a mainstream approach to software development because they shorten development cycles, minimize risk and help better prioritize features and customer requests. In fact, in a recent third-party study, Rally customer BMC Software was proven to have development cycles that were nearly three times faster than the industry average and one quarter the expected number of defects with double the team size.