Control measures for alignment of agile autonomous teams

Abstract: Modern organisations have to be more flexible and adaptive than ever before, in a continuous struggle to catch up to the ever-changing business environment. One aspect in which organisations try to improve flexibility is by moving authority closer to the problem, by granting workers more autonomy. An area where autonomy has become increasingly important is in agile software development, which is seen as one of the current trends in software engineering. A common issue for large scale agile companies is achieving agile autonomous teams, while at the same time preserving organisational alignment.Organisations adopting agile on a larger scale have to find a balance between autonomy for innovation and motivation, and control for compliance and alignment. The purpose of this study was to explore how autonomy and control is balanced in large scale agile teams, by examining the control functions which aligns them. This study aimed to provide insight into the autonomy of self-managing agile teams in large scale environments, and how the autonomy is regulated in order to preserve compliance and organisational alignment. To accomplish this a qualitative research approach with a single case study design was used. The research was based on an qualitative, exploratory case study of agile autonomous development teams in a Swedish financial institution. The findings of the study suggest that autonomous teams are aligned with the rest of the organisation via a combination of indirect and formal control measures. Further, the dynamic between autonomy and control was found to be more complex than a scale moving between autonomous and controlled. Different measures of control impact different aspects of work, and by extension different aspects of a team's autonomy.