Thanks Jurgen, found it! I like how the Merit Money article emphasizes that bonuses should reward collaboration. And agree that feedback is crucial to increase performance in any situation, so it should be rewarded.

Thanks Jurgen, your blog again makes clear that Bonus Systems do not deliver what people expect from them. It's good to know what doesn't work. But are there also alternatives to motivate people that do work? And do we know why they work? That would be interesting! I do not have the anwers (yet). I read about thing like positive psychology, happiness and non-violent communication, appreciation, feedback and kudos, and self-organizing and autonomy, and I think that there are things in there that can help us to understand more about motivating people.

I tend to agree, you can´t measure productivity directly, and express it in 1 figure. There are companies that measure things that they call productivity, I have my doubts if they are useful to provide insight, to manage and improve productivity (see also http://www.benlinders.com/2011/not-everything-that-can-be-counted-counts/). However as this article and several responses already mention, there are factors that influence how much value a software team deliveres to it's customers. Like problems that have been solved, user stories delivered, reduced maintenance costs, defects delivered, increased test coverage, team morale and happiness, etc. Careful measurement, analysis and discussion of some of these factors can certainly help to improve the value that is delivered by software teams.

Hi Jurgen, Some practices that make management Agile are: - Team staffing practices like Belbin, team building, etc - Establishing proper working conditions, like the 40 hour workweek, arranging team spaces and rooms for "quiet" and "loud" work, etc - Providing teams with sufficient and timely information (empowerment) - Setting team goals and "bonuses" (in stead of individual goals/rewards) - Enabling training and development opportunities for teams, like team learning days Looking at models that can help to manage agile teams, there is the People CMM (http://www.sei.cmu.edu/cmmi/tools/peoplecmm/), well, if you deploy it in an agile way that is. I've described a People-CMM roadmap for agile, for those who are interested in this see http://www.benlinders.com/2010/implementing-agile-with-the-people-cmm/. Also the Team Software Process provides support on how to manage teams (http://www.sei.cmu.edu/tsp/). Is this what you are looking for?