Team Balance

Mike Cohn - February 3, 2010

Agile Scrum ProjectsAtWork

Self-organizing teams are a key Agile principle. Indeed, employing the collective wisdom of a team is a great way to organize around any project work, and encourages ownership. But self-organizing teams shouldn’t be randomly assembled. In part three of our series on structuring and managing Scrum-based teams, here are some factors to consider when selecting or influencing who is on the team.

Editor's Note: This series is excerpted from Mike Cohn’s new book Succeeding With Agile, which examines critical factors in determining how to structure and manage Scrum-based project teams. In part one, the author explained the importance of keeping teams small. In part two, he recommended orienting each team around the delivery of end-to-end user-visible functionality. Here, in part three, he shares factors for making sure the right people get on each team.

The ability for a team to self-organize around the goals it has been given is fundamental to all agile methodologies, including Scrum. In fact, the Agile Manifesto includes self-organizing teams as a key principle, saying that “the best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams”

As part of deciding how best to achieve the goal given them, some teams will decide that all key technical decisions will be made by one person on the team.…

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Team Balance

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