Fitness and health is so many different things to so many people, but what is that one thing it should be for everyone? Any idea?........................... FUN !
Whatever it is that you do to keep yourself active, enhance the movement quality, whether it’s - lifting weights, walking, running, yoga, dancing, playing a sport or learning a new skill - there is one important question you need to ask yourself : Are YOU having FUN for the most part?
If you said YES, you've found yourself a great framework or a tool, that could keep your fit, healthy and happy for a long time to come. If you said NO, it means it's time to get out of it and find something that you have fun doing.
Why is FUN so important? What's the big deal about it?
Because, the only way to stay CONSISTENT is to enjoy what you're doing and that's much easier when you're having that daily dosage of fun. If it's not fun, what's the point to get at it every day? Consistency always beats intensity.
Same with Scrum!
Same with your Development Team(DT) or Scrum Team(ST) : Are you having fun? Do you enjoy what you do? Do you look forward getting back to it every day?
A great Development Team(DT) knows the importance of having healthy dose of fun every day. It's their oxygen, their fuel:
- Fostering fun, energy, enthusiasm and interaction creates a safe, healthy and transparent atmosphere where the DT can flourish.
- It creates room for constructive disagreements, productive conflicts and holding each other accountable to apply the team working agreements; thereby keeping out the artificial harmony.
- Great DT's considers their Scrum events as an opportunity for collaboration and conversations. They don't view it as 'meetings’.
- The legend, Scrum expert “Tobias Mayer” describes in his book “The Peoples Scrum”: “Scrum is centered on people”, and people have conversations !!! This directly relates to the Agile values : “Individuals and Interactions Over Process and Tools”.
- These are conversations to plan, synchronize, and to reflect. They have these conversations at the appropriate cadence, for appropriate duration's in order to elevate the transparency in their work.
- Without these conversations, they won’t know what they are doing (Sprint Goal and forecast), won’t know where they are heading(synchronization, inspecting the progress towards the Sprint Goal & adapting their Daily plan) and they’ll keep repeating the same mistakes again(reflection).”
- Great DT's have some slack within their sprint. Human beings can't be productive all day long. They need time to relax, have a chat at the coffee machine or play carrom, chess, foosball etc. They need some slack to fuel their innovation and creativity. They need time to have some fun.
- By doing so, they ensure high motivation, better focus and optimal efficiency. Slack also acts a risk buffer within the Sprint. It’s a shock absorber.
- It's necessary to handle emergencies that might arise. We don't want the entire sprint to get into trouble when there is a need to deal with a sudden, critical production issue.
- Build in some slack & keep the risk buffer handy(10-20%)! When the sprint doesn't contain any emergencies, great! Use that buffer for some refactoring, emergent design or do some spike experiments to solve some challenging technical, architectural or process problems.
Focus on creating a real fun environment, It's a win-win!
Until next time, sweat it out, rinse, recover and repeat !
#MakeFitnessAHabit #1repatatime #ScrumOn
Inspiration and References:
- Co-founder and Coach, Arvind Ashok ,@thequad.in,The Quad Fitness Pvt. Limited, Madras, India
- Barry Overeem, his insightful white paper on “ Characteristics of a Great Scrum Team”