Brad Appleton's Blog
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Written by Brad Appleton
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Monday, 15 June 2009 16:16 |
The previous blog-entry on self-organization was lots of jargon and technical mumbo jumbo that didn't say too much about what that means for teams of people. So let's shift from talking about self-organizing systems in complexity science to talking about how it applies to self-organizing teams in an agile context.
A self-organizing team is a team that is led and organized by it's members, to attain goals and objectives specified by management within the constraints of its environment:
- Management can shape and "nudge" the team and its members, but management doesn't try to dictate the details of "what" the solution is nor the process of how to create it.
- The team is responsible for not only leading and directing itself to achieve its goals, but also to monitor and adapt its behavior to correct/improve its own performance.
- This means the team can change how it leads and organizes itself in order to feedback and constraints from its environment, which also implies that ...
- There is no single central [...]
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Written by Brad Appleton
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Friday, 19 June 2009 17:08 |
In the past several blog-entries I've been focusing on the agile principle of self-organization, what it means, and what it implies for teams. So far, I've written about Agile Self-Organization versus Lean Leadership, Self-Organization and Complexity, and Agile Self-Organizing Teams.
For some online resources (articles and presentations) on self-organization and self-organizing teams, I recommend the following:
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Written by Brad Appleton
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Saturday, 13 June 2009 16:17 |
In my previous blog-entry I talked a little about how self-organization is a key aspect of software agility. In this blog-entry I'd like to explore in more detail just what "self-organization" really means.
Self-organization comes from complexity science and the theory of complex adaptive systems (CAS). A system is "self-organizing" if, left to its own devices, it tends to become more organized over time. This is in stark contrast to the concept of entropy
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Written by Brad Appleton
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Thursday, 11 June 2009 16:52 |
Getting back to the agility cycle ... recall that I started with the business agility cycle and used that to derive the software agility cycle. There isn't a great deal of difference between the first two steps of the business-agility cycle and the software-agility cycle, other than the fact that much of the former takes place at a higher-level of organizational management and strategy.
The biggest difference between the two cycles happens after those first two steps. In the business agility cycle we then decide-communicate-act, suggesting that it is the higher-ups who make and communicate the decisions and the lower-end of the organizational food chain (the "worker bees") that execute the organization's strategic solution.
If that seems a bit command-and-control, its because it is (a bit). It's also likely necessary in larger[...] |
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Written by Brad Appleton
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Tuesday, 09 June 2009 17:17 |
I'm sure I'm not the first person to think it, but I just came across the description of a newly published book whose title made me think about this subject. The book is:
Reading Minds and Markets: Minimizing Risk and Maximizing Returns in a Volatile Global Marketplace, by Jack Ablin and Suzanne McGee.
The title immediately made me think that this was the right language to use when communicating with business-people and senior management to describe what agility is in terms of its benefits to the bottom line.
Investopedia describes a "Value Proposition" as: "A business or marketing statement that summarizes why a consumer should buy a product or use a service. This statement should convince a potential consumer that one particular produc[...] |
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