Redistributing Work Among Teams - Simple Self-Organization
I coached a long-running program with at times up to 8 teams, 6 of which were running as agile teams. We used a program-level status meeting daily to do “official” coordination among teams.
Early on in the program, one of the team members who was maintaining the backlog for the iteration came to me and told me that Team 4 was done their work ahead of the end of the iteration and Team 3 was struggling to get their work done in the iteration. As the Process Facilitator I got this person plus members of the two teams together to have a quick 2 minute disucussion about the problem (T4 running out of work). They quickly worked it out amongst themselves and then let the other team member know so that he could maintain the backlog by redistributing the work items and tasks. The two teams easily fixed the problem and the iteration ended successfully.
If you have worked in a highly bureaucratic environment you will know that it can be extremely difficult to adjust plans to allow this sort of on-the-fly rebalancing of work. In chaotic environments, on the other hand, it is just too difficult to see these sorts of opportunities for rebalancing in the face of constant crisis and “heroic” efforts by people on the teams. Agile Work and the process facilitator provide a balanced context in which this adaptability and self-organization can flourish.
