Excited by a Blow-Up Santa!
Hard to believe, I know - not your usual intro for a blog on working in the Agile world, but there it is: Embrace Change 
I have very much enjoyed working with David Bloor, coming as he does from a lean background, and I am acutely jealous (see my last post) that he in turn is now working with a chap called Will Antjoule. Between them (and with the help and inspiration of the team they are working with) they have one of the best solutions for alerting everyone to the build failing: A giant Santa inflates and rises from the middle of the pod… (It certainly isn’t unique to have something happen - for example, lava lamps when the build fails).
Back to the Santa though, I was at their retrospective today, and am really interested in the outcome of an action that was raised: alerting when the build fails is quite useful, but what if it actually means people become reticent to check code in for fear of breaking the build - after all it will be visible!
Their new action to to find a way of celebrating a successful build, but in a non-invasive way - after all if things go well, this new event could be triggered 20 times a day, so even a quiet, gentle ‘beep’ will not do.
So, intrigued, I have been listening with interest to ideas being floated over the next 2 weeks - my favourite was the idea to rig up a small delivery of smarties or similar directly to the desk of the person who checked in the code. Having first hand experience of the sugar addiciton of this particular team, I personally think this might be a winner 
I can’t wait to hear how this turns out!
November 12th, 2008 at 09:19
OK - I’m loving this one, rewards for those people who actually performed well and achieved their goals . . . . I must admit, I have been out of the Lean world for a good while now and the somewhat jaded and cynical side of me begins to wonder if the only reward idea to be supported by management would be an instant delivery of brownie points to themselves….
November 13th, 2008 at 18:37
chocolate brownie points would be the absolute bests
Thanks for taking the time to comment on my site - and perhaps I’ll blog some excellent managment reward experiences I’ve seen. For those senior team members willing to try it, the reflected glory can be blinding! Helen.