Bringing Agile stand-ups to life, Meet Harvey!
If you are an Agile practitioner or scrum master I recommend some interesting ways to make Agile stand-ups more interesting. Building software can be a dry affair but remember a key goal in Agile is building high performance and a fully engaged team. A current initiative I’m engaged in involves a complex architecture where a file has to pass through a number of processing stages. Rather than have an ad-hoc stand up of updates, I arrange the team in the sequence that the file has to be processed. In fact, I start with the product owner. This before moving to the business analysts and the developers and then finally the testing stage. This gives the stand-up flow and cohesion.
In addition we have adopted a mascot called Harvey… Recently as I thought about how hard it was to make the solution work and the complexity of the technology involved it occurred to me that it was a little bit like a salmon swimming up-stream to spawn. Meet Harvey our team mascot! Whenever a team member speaks at a stand-up they hold Harvey and pass him onto the next team member. It’s a good reminder of our responsibility and also just how far Harvey has to travel to get to his final destination.
I recommend that when you run your stand-ups you innovate to make them come alive. In addition to making them more personal and above all else make sure that everyone keeps a sense of humor. I like to think of Agile stand-ups as the focal point of each day with everyone fully motivated to make the day successful.
And after all, why did we call him Harvey? Well that’s for another blog post…
If you’d like to discuss other innovative ways to keep your Agile stand-ups interesting, then contact us.
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