Welcome to the latest edition of the Carnival of Agilists - the rotating agile blogroll guiding you to the active voices in the agile community. In this edition we take a look at self-organizing teams, lean methods and a variety of other topics. Enjoy!

Self-organizing Teams

Jim Highsmith recently sent out an Cutter Email Advisory entitled "No more self-organizing teams". Jim feels the term "self-organizing" has outlived its usefulness within the agile community. He believes it gives agile a bad perception as it is too often equated to "anarchy". He points to Sanjiv Augustine's term "Light Touch" Management in his new book and blog post on "The Role of the Project Manager". Many others, including Tobias Mayer, disagree with Jim and Sanjiv representing the necessary language change required to get companies to make the 180-degree change required for agile to be successful - otherwise you just have a "watered-down" agile (pun intended). You can read Tobias' view here in "No more self-organizing teams. Not." Hard as it is to believe, I find myself on Tobias' side of this argument - a change in language is required. Read and decide for yourself the many posted comments to Jim's original posting.

Lean

Aaron Sanders wonders whether estimation should be considered a waste in an agile process in his post entitled Naked Planning Explained - Kanban in the Small. Interesting thought. I have been working recently with more flow-based teams who think similarly. They believe that late commitment is more efficient and effective than early commitment in a sprint. They claim higher performance with better quality because they don't have the false commitment over their heads which gives them more time to focus on doing things right. However, there has been one consistent attribute of teams executing this type of approach - they are more mature in breaking down work more granularly and have more built-in discipline than other teams.

David Anderson looks at lean in a slightly different angle in his post Lean Scales Differently than Agile. In this case he is focused on the scalability of the team with respect to the daily standup meeting. He indicates effective daily synchronizations of upwards of 20 people focused on Kanban work. My experience tells me that team collaboration breaks down after about 10 people, but I am always open to learning new things. Read his post and see for yourself.

Other Topics

Michael Vizdos portrays an excellent three-part series of posts on retrospectives in his unique style. Check them out - Part I: The Scary Team Retrospective, Part II: Beyond the Book Retrospectives, and Part III: Walk into the Light.

Dave Nicolet evaluates the Cutter Report on Enterprise Architecture and agile methods and thinks the authors should have taken one more step in the organizational alignment - I agree. Was Dave listening in my NFJS course on Agile Enterprise Architecture (sorry, shameless plug) or is he just a smart guy? You'll have to ask him, but first read his analysis of the report.

Mike Griffiths has an excellent post on Developing Authentic Leadership. Some of my favorite quotes include "Leadership can not be taught, but it can be learned" and "Managers use people to accomplish work, leaders use work to grow people".  Thanks Mike.

Sanjiv Augustine has a great agile business perspective in his post 5Qs on Agile. Next time your in an elevator with your CEO, you can use some of this wisdom to stand above the rest.

Chris Spagnuolo has some great ideas to clean up that leftover debt in The Bug Bash Sprint. Debt is still a killer issue for most teams.

Previous Editions

All previous editions of the Carnival are referenced at the Agile Alliance website.

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