Inject fun into your team: Tip #1

Bobak Saadat

13 Sep 2022 • 2 min read

Name your sprints

It's rare to be part of a team where everyone loves to bring the fun all of the time. So sometimes the delivery manager / scrum master has to bring out a little fun from the team from time to time. However, forced fun can be worse than no fun at all. Here's one way to gently nudge your team to more fun without people cursing you for forcing them to have fun.

Name your sprints fun things

This idea came into my practice partly from searching the net and partly from necessity. It's not an original idea and has been repeated over the internet, though I forget where I came across it now (it's been years since I came across it). I was in a role where the management insisted on having complex shorthand for sprints like 1.2.5 and no one apart from the most astute delivery managers could keep track of which sprint was which. So, in order to make things make sense, I translated the sprints into a code for my team and stakeholders. Here's how it works:

There's 52 weeks in a year and 26 letters in the alphabet. 52 divided by 2 = 26. That means if you have sprints every 2 weeks you can name them alphabetically from A-Z.

For example:

Sprint A = start January - mid January

Sprint Y = start December - mid December

It's intuitive to understand where you are in the year when referring to the sprints alphabetically. Plus, naming sprints makes them sticky. People will remember Sprint Mango for being that annoying sprint where you were blocked on everything but they won't remember Sprint 1.2.5 by name even if it was an eventful one.

The fun comes in allowing your team to choose and playfully argue over the names. If you use project management tools that allow a bit of customisation like Trello to run your project then you can also reinforce the sprint theme on the board itself by choosing images to go along with the sprint.

Pick a theme for the year (e.g. sea creatures) or get your team to vote in rotating themes every few months. Then get your team to vote on their favourite name before the sprint.