I genuinely believe that teams are the backbone of any organization. Team and teamwork are the heart and soul of every project and company. We all worked with great teams and loved that feeling of achievement, camaraderie and respect. We all also been a part of a team that was hugely dysfunctional where every day felt just wrong and underwhelming. Forming and empowering small teams within Scrum or Kanban processes allows an organisation to solves complex problems faced by them in constantly changing and challenging word. The Agile Manifesto also states that self-organizing teams can deliver the "best architectures, requirements, and designs."

In today’s turbulent markets, where technology is improving on a daily basis, and teams are shaping innovation into reality, there is an immense need for self-organizing teams. Teams that can thrive within that environment, embrace complexity and unknown future. Our processes are strongly focused on our teams, giving them the best chance to succeed, stay stable, having all the necessary skills and abilities and being cross-functional in the organisation.

This talk takes our efforts for great teams to next level considering what it means to be "self-organising" and what it really means for your team. This change has to be in coordination with the team itself, scrum master and management, which also is covered in this session.

The Organization have rules, standards, and procedures on how work is done and should have the control to delegate and prioritize the work assigned, this was what I was told and programmed few years back in the traditional organizational structure I was working for. Still, there we were asked to percolate Self–Organizing behavior in our teams, and that to under a fully constrained and micro-controlled environment. And what we use to get a few responsible individuals organizing tasks in a way to make their managers happy but never a team who can perform together.

Whereas, it is well understood that trained responsible individuals are the core of any Self-Organized team and who take responsibility to manage their own tasks and don’t rely on a manger to tell them what to do. At uCreate I am following Agile setup that is propagating a self-organizing team and implementing Agile manifesto: “The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organising teams”

Scrum team’s job is to self-organize around the challenges, and within the boundaries and constraints, put in place by management. In Self-Organizing Scrum team each member is responsible for determining what work he or she will be doing.

Now, creating a self-organizing team is a continuous challenge in today's dynamic world, where the focus of building a team can get sidelined due to changing business demands. Another uphill task is whose real duty is to create a Self-Organizing, is it the management, or Scrum Master or Scrum team itself.

So my today’s session is to discuss with you on how we can continuously pursue towards getting a Self Organizing team since this a continuous process like an organism grows towards maturity.

We at uCreate are also facing this challenge to change the mindset of individuals who were used to traditional approach and mentoring them or training them or coaching them to be responsible individuals in order to have real Scrum Teams delivering agility on its own.

There have been various ways it’s been practiced at ucreate but major two focus strategies are:

1. Review Tool.
2. Spare Time for Learning.

The above methods have sure imbibed responsible behaviour in our Scrum Teams but the lot has to be improvised to get responsible Self-Organizing Scrum teams.

Today’s agenda will be elaborating on above methods and also on few examples on how real-time facilitation is all about being a Scrum Master, rather than using command & control and what can be done to instil self-organizing culture among the Scrum Team members.

So, Creating a self-organizing team in Agile is not an easy task and takes a reasonable amount of time to form. ucreate has been adding deleting ingredients to help fast-track the formation of such self-organizing Agile teams but still a lot to be achieved in this regard. What as a team we learnt is that process of forming Self-organizing teams is that we should develop individuals who are

• Responsible
• Trained and Competent
• Motivated
• Respect talent and individuality
• Goal oriented

An organism grows from infancy to maturity and then delivers results but the process of development is long and learning all the way similarly Self-Organizing Scrum team is a long and continuous process. The Scrum Master should dwell on creating a team which can buy-in and share ownership, Motivation, which leads to an enhanced performance level of the team and Facilitate innovative and creative environment conducive to growth.