Self-organising teams. Introduction

Nowadays business have arrived to understanding that personnel is the key element of the success. One of the modern ways to organise employees is self-organising teams. Talking about software development, those teams have been successfully applied in agile development as agile methods promote a lot using this type of teams over others.

Self-organising teams or autonomous teams are employees teams having a high level authority in the organisation to make (independently) decisions on many (some) aspects of their work like planning, schedule, choice of tasks, budget etc.

Autonomy can be divided on external, internal and individual. The external autonomy of a team defines an influence of management and other groups of the organisation on the team and so how much they do restrict freedom of this group. The internal autonomy shows the the degree to which all members of the team participate in making decisions etc. This autonomy is low if there is one person making all internal decisions. Notice that the group could still will have a high internal autonomy having some type decisions made by one person if members delegated the right to do those decisions to that particular person. In this case they have a right to dismiss tis decision and returned to joined decisions once again.

Important requirements for creating self-organising teams are: such selection of participants that all team members have a similar level of knowledge and respect within the organisation; share a belief that collaborative work is "a must" in order to achieve project goal; and finally all team members are ready to give their best (not to wait each single minute been on work the day end moment).