The ideal of the “empowered” team (Cagan/ Jones 2020) sees Teams which are able to take their own decisions on the content and the mode of their work to the largest extent possible. This has been flanked by the DevOps movement, where product developers also run the operational IT infrastructure needed for the creation and use of their products (Forsgren et al. 2018).
The ideal of “independent” teams is about as little reliance on the work of others as possible, especially of others in the same organization (cf. Scaled Agile 2021). This ideal relates to the untangling of complex relations created in classical matrix organizations, where experts and their departments are often involved in numerous projects running concurrently, to the detriment of project progress and productivity.
Dirk Baecker (2017, 11) has observed this tension in the following form:
The focus here lies on creating and maintaining the empty space, the freedom to operate in agile ways of working.
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