Good read over on Mike Cohn’s blog about dictating rules to agile teams. Yes, it’s perfectly fine for leaders to place rules on self-organizing teams. We give teams boundaries, and that is fine. You just have to be sure you don’t make those boundaries so restrictive there isn’t any room left to be self-organizing.
For each rule, consider whether that rule alone is worth the risk. If it’s not, don’t put the rule in place. Also, any time you consider adding a rule to a team, see if there’s another rule (or constraint on how they work) that you can remove.
I find it helpful to keep a public list of these rules. This will make it easy to ensure everyone knows the rules and has a quick reference to the rules. It also makes it easy to quickly assess if we have too many rules. If they aren’t written down, you will forget about some and adding another may not seem that bad. However, when you have a list and each time you want to add one you have to go update the list, it will be much more obvious how many rules you have.
Read Mike’s full post here.