Do you have a self-organizing team? If so, half the battle is already won. But if not, beware: Creating a self-organizing team is far more challenging than we had ever imagined.

This article is a look at situations where communication among team members is a critical factor in the potential failure of a program or its success. This is not a deep technical article, but I believe it is thought-provoking. When humans communicate in written, verbal, and non-verbal forms, many times the receiver misses the intended meaning. The “failure to communicate” is the root cause for many program failures more times than we would admit or appreciate.

We all know that we are more productive if we can focus on one task. We also know that it is better to do the right thing. Unfortunately, it is not so easy to combine these two pieces of common sense during in the normal course of our life. Let us explore how we can understand the
bigger goal and how we can manage to stay focused on the goal during the execution of a project or during the development of a new piece of software.

Lessons learned during a Scrum training at Ericsson about the transition to agile software development.

Software organizations face challenges when trying to recruit highly competent software practitioners who can successfully participate in and contribute to a cooperative working environment. This article suggests—based on the presented research conducted in a large international communication company—that recruiting practitioners with high levels of self-efficacy can contribute to the organization on both the individual and team levels. This article also describes the research and its findings and discusses specific recommendations based on the research.

The Core Protocols are our 'best practices' for people, teams of people and organizations that want to get great results - all the time. They are 'Core' because they are foundational - they can be used by all teams, anywhere, even if you already have organizational patterns and best practices of your own. They are 'Protocols' because they name and prescribe ways that people can interact (behavior), predictably, like the 'protocols' followed in diplomacy.

Beyond technical skills, Agile Development depends on effective interactions and collaboration. In this article, Esther Derby outlines key collaboration skills that help teams maintain productive relationships, avoid destructive conflicts, and benefit from everyone’s best ideas.

Software development organizations have evolved to meet the challenges put forth by ever increasing complexity in both the problem spaces and the technologies applied. Unfortunately, the right people for a project may not all be located in the same city or at the same time. The skill, experience, and ethics of personnel have risen to the top of our list of essential factors when assembling teams. Our search for optimal teams has gone global and we need to find ways to work together in the face of these new challenges. At Band XI, we have adopted and adapted agile methods to make high-performing distributed agile development teams a reality.

These are the two Agile principles that emphasize the importance of self-organized teams for the success of a project and team. Numerous studies and research projects prove this as well. But forming a self-organizing team (or, to put it correctly, allowing a team to self-organize) is not that straightforward. Especially when the team was previously commanded and controlled, the general tendency is to wait for instructions than figuring out ourselves

The basic idea of the Moneyball approach is that organizations can use "objective" statistical analysis to be smarter and build better software project teams.