Braintwitter: #standup

Tuesday, June 21, 2016

Bringing Fun to Team room

I am big believer of encouraging teams to laugh and have fun together. In my mind it builds team's resilience.

Is it easy! NO WAY!!! It is the most difficult think to achieve when you are around bunch of engineers. I have been part of mora than 30+ teams so far and half of my team member appreciated being left alone to code.

I never give up and have lots of different post standup. I have few categories

Sheer Fun:

Trivia after standup - Pick a topic or theme for a week and ask one trivia question after standup. Provide team all the details along with the answer. This way team is learning and having fun. Great for co-located and distributed teams.
One Urban Dictionary word of the day - Open the webpage and ask the team to put hands together. Read the word and meaning together and say the word loudly at the end. Like sports team does. Distributed Team members can do the same as well.
15 seconds warmup - Pick any song with steps from youtube and jam together. Perfect for all teams.
Shake up - There are lots of games on PlanningForFailure website. These are a minute long and perfect for teams
Lifting weight: Start with 5lbs weight as standup token and then increase the weight slowly every iteration by 2 or 5 lbs. This will make your team strong every day and will not let them talk longer as well.

Games for Late comers but can also be played on regular basis:

Sing a song in local language or some funny song
Tell a chuck norris joke
Bring some sort of treats (donuts or cookies or fruits)
Sit on a broken chair or wear a kind of hat entire day.
5 Sit-ups or push-up for every minute you are late
Facilitate the scrum next day

These are the few things which I have tried in my teams. Let me know if you have done something interesting and fun :).

Enjoy!

Manisha

Extrasss: I play games before Demo and Retrospective all the times as well. I get my ideas from http://www.funretrospectives.com/ and http://plans-for-retrospectives.com/?id=3-86-26-61-40 and tasty cupcakes site.

Wednesday, March 16, 2016

Value of Standup

I am continuing my WHY series and here I go for standup.

Outcome of Standup:

We as a team should come out of standup, "knowing how to better attack our day".

Standard 3 questions:

What did you do yesterday or from the time we met?

What will you do today?

Are there any impediments in your way?

Why behind each question:
1) What did you do yesterday or from the time we met? (10-20% of time)

By sharing, what we finished yesterday, we get a sense of accomplishment and also helps in keeping us committed to our yesterday's promise.

It is an opportunity to share any quick learning with the team

It is also a good segue to the next questions.

2) What will you do today? (50-60 % of time)

It helps us in planning our team day and allowing us to effectively plan and execute

It helps, team member/s raise a concern, if their plan, intersects or conflicts with your plan.

It allows team member/s to share their knowledge or offer help to you, if they have better knowledge around the area.

It allows team member/s to share their bad experience around the area.

3) Are there any impediments in your way? (20-30% of time)

We raise them to be able to resolve it as a team as quickly as possible.

Benefits of a stand-up:

It is short.

This saves everybody's time, as most of the issues raised will likely only require two people to be involved.

It is effective in giving all team members an overview of where, for example, a project is.

Who should be part of it:

I like the below story, since it best describes the situation.

Chicken: "Let's start a restaurant."

Pig: "Good idea, but what should we call it?"
Chicken: "How about 'Ham and Eggs'"
Pig: "No thanks. I'd be committed, you'd only be involved."

All the Pigs should be part of it and Chickens should be refrained from distracting team.

Other things, we can discuss after standup:

Any thing, which impacts entire team can be quickly discussed after standup. Since the team is already together, one should take advantage of their focus switch. We may discuss topics which required entire teams attention. For example: