One of the principles of the Scrum approach to agile development and project management is self-organisation. The benefit(s) that occur when a team self-organises include improved performance and creativity within the team.

It is important to remember that when a team is self-organising, it is still working towards the goals of the organisation, so the direction of the team is set by the organisation’s management. Self-organising is not the same as self-serving. A quote from Philip Anderson in the Biology of Business which I read in Mike Cohn’s blog sums it up;

Self-organization does not mean that workers instead of managers engineer an organization design. It does not mean letting people do whatever they want to do. It means that management commits to guiding the evolution of behaviors that emerge from the interaction of independent agents instead of specifying in advance what effective behavior is.

So the scrummaster’s approach to facilitation and guiding the team is important to ensure the organisation’s and project goals are being fulfilled, while the project team organises itself. I have decided in this blog to use two video clips which discuss the principles of self-organisation, how to roll it out in an organisation and some differences with traditional project management;

• The first video features a short interview with Esther Darby by Bas DeBeer.
• The second video focuses on the differences between an agile and waterfall project that was put together by Chris Spagnuolo

For a more detailed discussion on agile principles, including self-organisation and how to implement them successfully, I would point readers to a Youtube video on a talk by Jeff Sutherland at Google.