RallyDev.com
I was raised in the land of big software releases.
I spent over a decade celebrating the release of software to gold master at five different companies. These events included plaques and various levels of behavior based on the amount of flesh that was lost in the release. A few of them were great, but many of them left a bad taste in your mouth based on what was shipped or not shipped.
Early on at Rally, it was the same way. We celebrated releases. In our case, the numbered releases come about every 6 to 8 weeks. I can recount having some over-the-top release parties, but mostly they seemed empty. Now, we have moved to a world of release lunches. These lunches now come after our retrospectives allow us to close the cycle well. I do not consider them celebrations as much as a way to close.
Now we do something quite different, we make fun and celebration part of the agenda for every release planning. As a result, we have events spread throughout the release and in many cases tied to holidays.
For example, here are three of the “scrumkins” entered in the Halloween contest.
In another example, last week we had Formal Friday. Formal Friday involved everyone wearing some type of formal wear to work. In a software company with T-shirts and shorts the typical attire, it was quite a shock to see many of our team members wearing a tie. I honestly thought there was a funeral. See for yourself.
Jeff's Pink Suite was the unanimous favorite
These examples of celebration build teams, trust and relationship much more that the big bang events of the past.
The source for this change started back in 2005 when we had a great Technical Advisory Board. At one of the meetings Luke Hohmann game me a copy of Managing to Have Fun by Matt Weinstein. It is a great book with some great ideas.
At this same time we also hired Melissa Gallegos onto our team. Melissa moved from a role in QA to become our ScrumMaster. She runs release planning and scrum of scrum meetings. I shared Weinstein’s book and some ideas with Melissa as she started to move into the role. In 2007, as Melissa began to get her stride, she became the official Master of Fun at Rally. Melissa is a natural; as demonstrated by the blow-up palm tree and tons of toys on her desk.
So I ask, who is your master of fun at your company?
At Rally, we tend to celebrate as a company based on external validation. External validation includes awards, product reviews, customer feedback or financial performance. We do this because external wins are a whole company effort. We focus on closure and managing to have fun in the teams because Chris Avery and others proved to us that the key to high performance teams is trust, relationship and shared purpose.
Happy Halloween! enjoy the Day of the Dead and your own celebration.
About the Author: Ryan Martens is a mountain biker, founding board member of the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado, and Founder and CTO at Rally Software Development. Subscribe today to get free updates by email or RSS.
