Category: team building

Making myself redundant in 6 months with Scrum

April 2, 2009 by Peter Stevens

“My job is to make myself redundant.” That’s what I told my customer 6 months ago as we started our Scrum coaching project. The development group had been working for almost 2 years trying to develop a software package which would make the company’s very sophisticated hardware attractive to its potential customers. They were “close” to a release, but the release always seemed to recede into the distance like the horizon. Six months later, my assignment is finished: what did the team accomplish, what did it not accomplish, and did I achieve my goal of becoming redundant?

My First Day

I spent the morning with management. In the afternoon I met the development group. The team was under a lot of pressure to make a release “soon.” I realized as I looked around the meeting room, all managers (including myself) were sitting on one side of the table, the developers on the other. Hmm.

A Tasty Team Building Exercise

May 11, 2008 by JurgenAppelo

A good team building exercise which (at least to me) is preferable over helicopter droppings, mountain climbing and mud wrestling, is to invite a bunch of colleagues for an evening of cooking.

Team Building
I regularly organize these team building events so that employees have a chance to get to known each other, to improve communications, and to show off my Italian kitchen. On such an occasion six of my colleagues come over to my place, usually straight from work, and when they arrive I hand out some copies of different Italian recipes (after hiding the expensive wines and having made sure that all ingredients and cheaper wines are prominently displayed and ready for use). These team members have no experience in cooking together, while some of them have never had to cook their own dinner at all. And on top of that they are working in a kitchen they have never used before.