Andrea Provaglio – Beyond Agile: Effective Self Organization, 27 September in Timisoara

Join Andrea Provaglio and learn, through lectures and practical exercises, why self-organization is so important, what factors prevent it to happen and the countermeasures you can take.

Have you adopted an Agile approach, but the people in your team are still not showing the level of participation and commitment you were hoping for? Decisions-making is still not working right? Leadership is confused? The team’s morale is not taking off? Deadlines are still not met? Then you are not reaping all of the benefits that Agile may bring into your organization.

We know that self-organization is a critical aspect of every successful Agile project; we also know that it’s based on trust, respect, openness and responsibility. So, why so many teams have such a hard time to fully achieve it?

One reason is that self-organization changes the leader/team dynamics and the teammate/teammate ones. Resistance to this change may arise in different ways and the source is frequently rooted in mental habits, such as a latent blaming culture, confusing guidance and command, fear of taking responsibility or losing status, unconscious agendas.

Another reason is that self-organization requires a radically different way of thinking about the team and about your development process, compared to the industrial (a.k.a. Waterfall) approach that the IT industry as been practicing for so long.

The industrial approach implies that things happen more or less sequentially and that each step is measurable and predictable, but this linear thinking is just inadequate for products we create and for the complexity that we find in many software development process. In IT, people are interconnected not just by means of their institutional roles (the organizational chart) but also by interactional and influential relationships, which all together create a web of very articulate dynamics.

For self-organization to really happen, these dynamics should be clear and we should be able to understand those factors that block the interaction and commitment of the people involved in our project.

In this workshop we’ll start with looking at what Agile means, at its core, for a development team and then with understanding why self-organization is so valuable.

We’ll proceed with exploring the different ways by which self-organization may manifest itself or be otherwise prevented, intentionally or unintentionally.

The attendees will also be involved in practical, guided exercises that will let them experiment first-hand the concepts presented. Many of these exercises can be used inside their own organization as simple tools to improve the level of commitment and participation of the team.

[Read more about this class](/training-offer/beyond-agile-effective-self-organization/)