The benefits of autonomy to our motivation at work have long been known.  Should any further evidence be required, however, research from the University of Texas at Austin aims to provide it.  The study found that when software development teams were given freedom over how they tackled projects, they were generally more productive, which led to more satisfied customers.

As such, the authors argue that managers should strive to maintain a hands-off approach to managing project teams so that those teams retain an environment of operational and creative flexibility.  This allows them to better respond to any changes required in the software, which will ultimately lead to happier customers.

“By giving greater autonomy to your teams, you allow them to exercise greater judgment about what would actually work based on their project requirements,” the researchers say. “We show there’s no one right way of achieving superior project performance, no one-size-fits-all.”

Team performance

The researchers tracked a combination of traditionally managed and agile project teams over 50 months in an Indian software company with around 125,000 software developers.

The project was initiated after the introduction of a new policy at the company that granted some teams greater autonomy over their operations.  The researchers were therefore able to monitor the effect of the change on the performance of the teams.

In total, the researchers monitored 461 projects, with the managers on 146 of those projects given autonomy to design the projects how they wanted according to process diversity, levels of managerial control, and location and time differences among the team.

“Managers of autonomous teams could each choose what type of structure worked well for them and their project team, versus having something dictated to them by a central point of contact,” the researchers explain.

The productivity of each team was measured according to function points, which the researchers used as a proxy to determine the functionality of the software.  The results showed that teams who switched to a more autonomous structure increased their value add by around 39%, with customer satisfaction also increasing.

Obviously the nature of software development is highly agile, so that has to be stated as a caveat for the findings, but nonetheless, the results provide clear food for thought with regards to how best to structure teams to get the best out of them.