How to Build a Great Team Culture During Sprints
How to Build a Great Team Culture During Sprints
During a sprint, you want your team to be focused, productive, and happy.
Obviously, you won’t want to break the momentum of your sprint by working in lots of team-building activities or other distractions. So how do you build a great team culture during sprints?
Keep Planning Quick, Simple, and Realistic
Your sprint should be planned in a clear, simple way. Make sure that everyone knows what to expect and, most importantly, clarify any points of confusion or uncertainty before the sprint begins. This should help with accurate time estimates and reduce excessive changes in scope during the sprint, too.
It’s a good idea to plan for around 60–75% of your maximum capacity. If you plan for over 80%, you’re setting your team up to fail. Your planning should be realistic: some bugs might take longer to fix than expected, for instance, or unforeseen problems may come up.
Stick to Core Scrum Team Roles
Your scrum team should consist of:
- A Product Owner, who represents the customer perspective of the product.
- A Scrum Master, who makes sure the team sticks to Scrum theory, practice, and rules.
- The Development Team, who do the work of creating the meaningful increment by the end of the sprint period.
It’s important that all members understand and stick to their roles. For instance, the Product Owner needs to order the product backlog, share and advocate for the product vision, and more. They shouldn’t function as a mouthpiece for the CEO.
The Scrum Master’s focus should be on the team’s development, supporting their growth, proactively acting on team conflict, encouraging the team to self-organize, and preventing impediments to the team.
The Development Team should all be equal: no one has a special title and there are no sub-teams. All members should take ownership of the outcome and should pursue technical excellence together.
Be Flexible and Find the Best Ways of Working Within Each Sprint
During some sprints, it might make sense for different members of the development team to tackle different user stories — especially when these are fairly small and straightforward, with few interdependencies.
But in other sprints, it might make sense to use swarming, where the team works together on the highest-priority story before tackling the others. This is an effective technique for complex user stories.
The development team should be encouraged to experiment with different approaches, and to consider which approach might make the most sense when faced with a particular backlog.
Encourage Face-to-Face Communication
Although it can be difficult, particularly if your team is still working remotely due to Covid, it’s important to encourage as much face-to-face communication between team members as possible.
This is particularly important between the PO and the rest of the team. As Barry Overeem explains:
“A great Product Owner understands that the best way to convey information is face-to-face communication. User stories are explained in a personal conversation. If a tool is used for backlog management, its function is to support the dialogue. It never replaces good old-fashioned conversation.”
Have Strong Support Systems, e.g. in HR
You don’t want your sprint to be derailed because some of the development teams are facing personal challenges. For example, if there’s a conflict that the Scrum Master isn’t able to deal with, then there should be a strong support system that can help appropriately — such as your HR department.
Ideally, this work begins before the sprint itself. For instance, picking an HCM system that works seamlessly will help your HR department to fully support your employees during the sprint.
Use the Sprint Review to Celebrate the Scrum Team
At the end of the sprint, during the sprint review (and before the retrospective), it’s great to include an element of celebration. You want your team to feel proud of what they’ve achieved. Dan Radigan writes:
“We love sprint reviews because they protect the health and morale of the team. Sprint reviews are all about team building. The review isn’t adversarial, it’s not an exam — it’s a collaborative event across the team in which people demo their work, field questions, and get feedback.”
Watch Your Existing Team Culture
Of course, your existing team culture will be reflected in each sprint — and underlying issues may come out during the pressures of the sprint.
It’s important to look at your existing team culture and the culture of your organization as a whole. While you might not be in a position to make large-scale changes, you could look at what you can do to influence the overall culture.
A good sprint can be a great experience for all involved, with everyone finishing the sprint feeling proud of what they’ve achieved as a team. This doesn’t happen by accident, though: for a good sprint, you need careful planning, clear roles, flexibility, great communication, and strong support for team members who might be having difficulties.
With those in place, you’ll have a great team culture — and a successful sprint.
