Emergent behaviour in self organizing teams

In recent months I've been working within scrum. It's been a learning experience for me. I hadn't worked in this type of environment before.

An important aspect of scrum that has taken some getting used to is the self organizing aspect of it. Historically I've always been in a model where there is the team lead/project manager who hands out assignments to programmers, monitors progress, and then hands out the next assignment. Over the years I've been both the programmer receiving and carrying out instructions, and the team lead identifying tasks and distributing them to team members.

With scrum there's just the list of tasks and people just grab one. That can lead to some interesting dynamics. In a way it can lead to silos if people just do what they know and are comfortable and familiar with. Perhaps that's not necessarily bad. I think that the team lead (but more importantly the team itself) still has something of a role in self organizing in ensuring that less desirable tasks are distributed fairly and the more interesting work is also distributed fairly.

In self organizing teams different themes may emerge. One would be the classical concept of the "chief programmer team". Once thought to be an academic construct, this could emerge in a scrum type setting. Especially if an individual is a really outstanding developer. In that case you may find the others will take on secondary tasks so that the key developer's time is maximized writing code. Also the key developer may either explicitly or implicitly in the group take on the most difficult assignments and more routine assignments are picked up by the others. In that sense it optimizes the work load in a way that the traditional team leader/task distributor model cannot.

I didn't look into it so I don't know if there's a lot of research around on self organizing teams. In software specifically this has only really been strongly around for the last few years. So I think there's some opportunities there for social scientists to make their mark and study this emerging area. I think there's probably some interesting and perhaps unexpected observations to be made.

This might be a good topic for someone looking for an honors project in the social sciences. Hang out with a scrum team or two for a few months, attend the daily standup, retrospectives, demos, etc. See what you can come up with about the emerging group dynamic. This is quite doable at most universities (I'm talking about you Laurier) as there are always tech companies near to campuses. Another possibly interesting angle might be to correlate DISC scores and scrum team dynamics to see if there's any influences there.