Yeah, we did one self-organising project, we were working under the mantra of better software faster. The idea was quality and speed, better software faster, yeah, brill. I would reckon we could double the speed just by going faster. The theory was that we could get twice the performance out of the team by doing it faster, just by sorting out all the little problems.
So, we used the technique. We had retrospectives and we spoke to the team had been doing this before the self-organising team, they had had a lot of success. They themselves had doubled their own productivity. We agreed a productivity measure with them and they went out and they doubled it quite clearly. So why do we want to do self-organising? We felt that there was still more speed being gained from motivation. If the software was good, then people would be happy and proud of it and they’d put effort into it. We thought that if we helped them sort out their own problems and then give them mechanisms for reporting problems they couldn’t solve, and the management take care of it, then that would be another boost. There would also be this third boost from getting both these things together and cracking them up. So, well, we thought we’d try self-organising. I’d always wanted to do it, and it largely worked.
At one point the team just went “Well, we’re bored with the interface” and they just changed it, they just put a new thing on. So I came along one day and I was like “What the bloody hell happened here?” I was just so staggered. But looking at it in a wider context, which is what I should have done, was that there were good things like the case where the lighting in the room wasn’t right, everyone was getting headaches, so they went up to Argos and bought new lights. They’d say “Can you sign this receipt?” and I was like “Yeah, sure.” So instead of little problems getting in the way they were just [CLICKS FINGERS] fixing, fixing, fixing. The UI thing was an unexpected side effect of that, but it wasn’t bad, don’t get me wrong, I was just surprised.
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