Fostering a self organising team culture.

Depending on the stage and scale of the company - the need is to adapt to different winning strategies. However one all-time desirous strategy is to build self organising teams in which individuals and collectively the teams exhibits the following traits:

1. high sense of responsibility and ownership
2. self initiated
3. high morale
4. finally gets the desired results

As leaders and heads who is looking to drive such a team culture - few things that can work towards this end are

1. State the objectives with clear boundaries and criteria - and leave the execution to the team. In short state the why as clearly as possible with the limits and boundaries, and leave the how for the team to decide. This will place the ball in the court of the team, and instills in them a sense of responsibility and purpose also triggers some of the above mentioned qualities like - exploring, ownership, high sense of morale and autonomy.
2. Give room for the team to make mistakes, iterate and reinvent themselves. Though this can lead to productivity and cost over-runs initially, but the long term benefit of taking shape as a self-organised teams and company is truly worth. When people are trusted well enough - often trust and dedication is reciprocated. But where consistent errs are observed - then its clear that the time is ripe to call the shots.
3. Allow processes and cadence to emerge organically based on the dynamics that exist in the context of the present state and stage of the organisation. Don't try to enforce something that is carried forth from any previous practices raw and plain. But allow processes and cadence to emerge organically.
4. Hold people accountable for results - simple enough to setup cadence for updates and reviews. Encourage team work and peer reviews.

When people are trusted well enough - often trust and dedication is reciprocated. But where consistent errs are observed - then its clear that the time is ripe to call the shots.

These are few basic guidelines we have been learning at Tacten.co where we can say we are almost getting there in fostering a self-organised teams culture.

Recently we applied this strategy for building out our CI/CD pipeline for our dev delivery practice.

For a long time, we tried to experiment from using one tool after the other in getting straight with a CI/CD process - we kept switching between tools as and when we came across something new in the market. But we failed miserably in seeing a simple and effective CI/CD practice take shape in our dev team.

Finally we took a step back and began to think about the why and the end goal of why we need the CI/CD. Asking that question to ourselves we could answer the following.

1. CI/CD will help us deliver fast and make developer lives easy so that they can pay better attention to the software requirements, and quality.
2. It enforces writing good unit test cover and static code checking and other best practices and disciplines that are prerequisites for a functional CI/CD. The upside benefit is more traceable and high quality product releases in a continuous and fast manner.
3. Ability to make faster releases to production and quickly show and iterate faster. The moment a feature is ready - boom - it can hit production.

Once we established the goals for the CI/CD, and identified what all we needed to put such a practice in place - (keeping aside our biases about tools and tech to achieve this). It gave us the imperative now to objectively explore proven tools and processes that exist and that has worked well for other teams also. We further removed unnecessary stuff out the door - like multiple branches for dev, qa, and master - our process allows us to have just two branches - a develop and a prod. We can test locally and don't have a real need for redundant QA env.

Now the why exercise gave the team the drive for organizing themselves around what is being achieved and focused towards what it takes to get to the goal.

We are betting on extrapolating this approach to other areas of our operations as well and see the same approach bearing fruit in those areas as well.