What's in a Name?

Words don't define, they reveal...

I insist that teams find a name for themselves. In my view, it's important they establish and own their identity. What they come up with can be revealing. "Two Weeks Notice" was the name selected by a team that had been forced through a string of death marches. A clever play on what they thought of Scrum’s two week sprints and their job. The message was not lost on management. It was a gigantic team - 22 people! In the end the only viable solution was to break the team up in to two teams and let go of a few people. Not just because they were too large, but the negative attitudes had become intractable.

My best case study for the influence of team names emerged from a short gig I had as a scrum master for a company working in the healthcare space. I inherited two teams. The practice at this company was for management to name the teams. In a stroke of brilliant genius - or maybe it was just a stroke - teams were named after shapes. My teams were the "Ovals" and the "Rectangles." Along with myself as scrum master, we had an excellent product owner - a former registered nurse with deep industry knowledge and firm grasp of all things Agile. We also had several people who floated between teams - shared talent or individual contributors - as needed.

The Ovals were a great team. Professional, hardworking, and fun. Like every technical team I've worked on or with, they were also mischievous and couldn't help meddling with the inane things management kept foisting on them. So they modified their team name. The Ovals were known locally as "Ovaltine" and with that came their own name placard.

The Rectangles were the evil twin to the Ovals. While they did good work, on their way to barely meeting deadlines they were loud, argumentative, and immature. The individual contributors despised the Rectangle team not just because the team always seemed to be behind and required lots of the individual contributors' time, but working with them was like being thrown back into junior high school. As with the Ovals, the Rectangles came up with their own spin on the official team name.

My first day on the job, the very first email at the top of my inbox was a meeting invitation for the Rectangle's (I know, you can't unsee it, can you. Sorry!) daily scrum.

I think you get the picture. There's nothing more I can add to convey the disparity of attitudes and character between the two teams. That management could have been unaware of this for over a year is a good reflection of the culture within the organization and not just with the teams. And there were other early signs of systemic issues. I had work to do.

Along with many other things to change, the team names needed a refresh. I worked to get permission from management to change the team names (Yes, I actually had to work at convincing management the team name situation wasn't a good one.), but that went sideways when the automation tester on the Rectangles team figured out a way to game the survey.

Unfortunately, the team was living up to it's original name.

My tenure at this company was short. The rot was too deep for a lowly scrum master to resolve and the Ovals, though the stand-out exception that they were, wasn't enough to keep me interested or optimistic. So I left for greener pastures. Well, different pastures, anyway.

The Agile world is a small one, even in a big city. I eventually heard that HR got wind of this situation and the place blew up. I'm not even sure if it's an Agile shop anymore. As unpleasant as it was to work there, I'm more upset by the effect all this had on the sizable majority of good people who were working there. None of these issues were Agile issues. But Agile was doing a good job of illuminating them. Management's blind eye and elitist position of "Agile is for those people, not us" did more to stifle success and sink the implementation than anything else, including the juvenile behaviors from the Rectangles team.