Organizations now understand that self-organizing teams perform better. Unfortunately, it’s extremely difficult to find the right balance between control and empowerment that works for your teams in your context. Even after your teams begin to self-organize, you are not finished. You should increase the level of self-organization over time as your teams mature. Shawn Button and Chris Farrell present a concise acronym that can help you empower your teams: BEGIN―Boundaries, Empowerment, Goals, Ingredients, and Nurture. BEGIN can be used as a checklist to ensure that you cover the necessary elements of self-organization, or as an exercise to use with teams and management to establish a self-organization contract. This session is a mix of workshop and lecture. Participate in exercises designed to illuminate the benefits of self-organization, and learn how BEGIN can be used to create and evolve self-organization.
Chris Farrell
Rally Software Development
Chris Farrell started in the late 1990s as a developer in the aerospace and gaming industries. In 2004, he applied for a position doing Extreme Programming. Chris wondered if this was something like programming while cave diving. He didn’t expect that working on an XP team would cause him to reevaluate what he knew of programming. XP would humble him—and help him unleash his real potential. Currently an agile coach at Rally Software, Chris is now a cave diver.
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