ladies, wall and sprints

improvements in team in progress

I recetly put our's sprint backlog on the wall. It's more readable, it requires no additional effort to know what is going on and you are always up to date. I wrote more about this here. We are still using reguar tools to manage sprints, but wall is used not for managing purpose, but for visualization. And from what I can see, everyone likes this idea.

The wall was only a first step to increase motivation in team and identification with product, that we are delivering. There are lot more in my head and I will definitely share everything just after I will have any observations.

Recently we startet to do meetings, which main purpose is to know our's customer better, to know what they want to get and to know what we need to beware. I need to admit, that I see many positive aspects of them and after few more meetings I'll describe how it works in our team.

feel the project

Today I want to write about one idea related with identification with project.
I read once, that is worth to give better names to your sprints, something nice and catchy instead of using names like "sprint N". Thanks this, people identify with their work significantly more, because this is not another sprint like many others before, no, this one got its own identity and team is the one, who defined this identity.

Ok, but how we should call our sprints?
I proposed to use letters of alphabet, I think it's pretty natural way and we are still capable to get number of the current sprint, even if there is no number in the name.
I wrote letters from A to M on whiteboard and told the team that we firstly need to come up with names for first eleven (we estimated work on next release for eleven sprints).

But there was still no idea what the names should be.

"Maybe we will chose the names of the beautiful ladies?" - I proposed.
Because all people in team are males, idea was accepted without any objections.

After half an hour we had our eleven names.
"And what we will do with it?" - they asked me.
I told them, that we will put on our wall, just above the sprint backlog, three photos of the lady, which will be a "patron" of particular sprint and we will change those photos sprint after sprint.

"And what about L and M?" - someone ask.

"We estimated, that our release will took 11 sprints, so L and M are reserved for a ladies, that you would not want to ever meet. We need to try to never put theirs photos on the wall."

So we got our names and three photos are on the wall already. We would see if we succeed to not reach letter L and M :)