Managing Self-Organizing Teams

The agile manifesto states that the best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams. This statement raises questions about how self-organizing teams work, how they are managed, and how to encourage self-organization.

This book offers practical answers to all these questions and more. Siegfried Kaltenecker describes how team management in a self-organizing environment works and offers tips on how to improve your own management skills. He introduces the basics of self-organizing teams: commitment, simplicity, respect, and courage. He uses real-world agile and lean projects to illustrate the guiding core competences: focus, design, presentation, and change. He recommends specific tools—such as customer radar, visual management, moderate interrogation, and feedback planning—that you can use to implement your own projects.

You will learn how interdisciplinary leadership and distributed management responsibilities work, and how to improve your own management skills.

The 2nd edition has been revised to include new topics such as value stream analysis, design thinking, delegation boards, and clarification meetings. It also includes new agile leadership case studies.