A lot of agile methodologies (including Scrum) relies heavily on a notion of self-organizing team.
First of all, everybody talks about it but nobody puts a good definition what is self-organizing team. As I understand self-organizing team notion was introduced as an opposite to a team which is organized externally (a.e. by manager). The main idea behind it was that smart people tend to find the best way to work together (vs being told how they should do their work).
Good in theory. Bad in practice.
Let say we have have a team. Most likely, couple of members of this team will be quiet introverts who don’t want to organize (rather they would prefer to be organized). There will be several more junior team members who may have not enough experience to organize effectively. As result so called “self-organization” is done by one or couple opinionated (and usually experienced) persons on the team who drives the team in one direction vs another.
On top of that, there are couple of interesting questions (specifically related to Scrum):
– Does a team decides what it should do? The answer is No (Product owner does)
– Does a team defines an overarching process? The answer is No (Scrum is well defined process and usually Scrum master enforces it.)
– Is there a person in a company which can override team decision? The answer is Hell yes. The company is paying money to the team, so if the team goes in a wrong direction there will be a person (ultimately CEO) who can override any decision.
What do we have as a result?
We have a team which doesn’t define what to do, doesn’t define major backbone of the process, can be overridden and driven by one or several opinionated persons.
Frankly, it doesn’t sound as a self-organization to me. It sounds like these several active persons are doing team lead job (without having official title). I am not saying whether it’s good or bad, all I am saying that the name (“self-organized team”) doesn’t match to the content.
