europlop

A treat for those who like a longer read, two new papers. Both of these come from this summer’s EuroPLoP 2024 conference. As with all my other patterns papers these are on my website.

Patterns for Highly Autonous Teams

The first, Patterns for Highly Autonomous Team is a joint work with Tsvetelina Plummer and gives three patterns for, well, highly autonomous teams:

• Autonomy over Money
• Everyone a Manager
• Simple Financial Reports

In addition to the patterns the paper contains a long pre-amble on the nature, naming and history of autonomous team – which also explains why the terms “self-organizing team” and “self-managing team” may not be the best.

Perhaps controversially the pre-amble also described why management and leadership are in not different things but, in fact, inseparable.

The patterns themselves seek to recast existing ideas in the pattern form supplemented by our own observations and additional examples. The origins of the paper was a desire to writer and research Autonomy over Money. When we went looking for new case studies we got two surprises. First, there were fewer examples to find than we expected – although they certainly do exist. Second, most of the examples we found were outside of technology and software development in particular.

So, read the paper and let me know what you think.

Team Energy Thoery

Second up is a write up of a focus group discussion of little theory which I’ve had for some time. To explain, let me quote from the paper:

“Team Energy Theory proposes using the metaphor of energy to describe team work. Specifically, TET explores how the rules of energy can be used to describe team work.

This paper describes a workshop which explored the theory. The workshop decided the theory was useful and provides some insight. It was agreed the model could be usefully applied with other groups to discuss what made for an effective team and how less effective teams came to be.

Several parallels were explored, e.g. natural tendency to minimise energy expenditure, and several more were identified for further exploration, e.g. the different forms of energy and conversation of energy between these forms.”

Again get in touch if you have any questions or would like to continue the discussion.

Both these papers best thought of as late drafts. They will officially be published as part of the ACM Digital Library proceeding of EuroPLoP 2024 in the coming weeks. However, I prefer these versions because the font and layout make them much more readable. (It is beyond me how anyone can read the ACM format.)