I recently attended a workshop on developing effective teams. The university I work for is in the earlyish stage of Agile maturity. I’m not. That’s why they’ve hired me. To introduce Agile and transform their digital team.

The workshop facilitator asked us to think about the most successful team experience we’ve had across our career and what made a successful team. The answers to this question came hard and fast – a great leader, enough resources, clarity of roles. I shouted out my answer along with the other participants – FUN! Silence descended on the room. All other participants looked at me. The facilitator responded, “no one has ever used that word to describe why a team was successful.

I discovered in that instant that in this organisation, needed to learn that work could also be fun.

I quickly devised a way for us to combine both an activity to embed a better understanding of story articulation, with teaching the team to have a bit of fun. This project, which in the planning phase I ran with the utmost seriousness, was labelled The Great Pancake Cookup.

The team was invited to an express project inception where we fleshed out our elevator pitch:

For the Digital Team
Who need to have fun through an inclusive team activity
The Great Pancake Cookup is a lunchtime event
That will allow us to enjoy a delicious meal we prepare ourselves, actualise how well we collaborate AND make all other staff insanely jealous as the delicious smell permeates the office.
Unlike other teams, our lunchtime event will not consist of soggy veal parmas or limp burgers, but express our inner Masterchef through both creative savoury and sweet pancakes.

The scene was set. We got right down to discussing our trade off sliders.

Time: We decided on one hour from prep to consumption – preferring to slightly supress our inner Masterchef in favour of having enough time to enjoy our meal.

Budget: We agreed to each kick in about the equivalent of what we’d normally spend on eating out for lunch.

Quality: This wasn’t something we were prepared to compromise on, as we had clarity on our customer base’s expectations – nothing less than scrumptious. We did agree to compromise on presentation though, given our time constraints.

Scope: As Product Owner, I really needed to temper scope creep. Yes – a choice of 10 savoury and 10 sweet toppings was attractive – for the breakfast buffet at the Hyatt Hotel, but could the consumers still feel delighted with perhaps 4 or each? I surveyed them and they thought there would still be good uptake.

The day of the event arrived. As Product Owner, I was busy approving stories so they could be moved into the done column:

As the Digital team, we want to have all the correct equipment available for cooking pancakes, so that we can successfully prepare our meal.

Acceptance criteria:

• mixing bowl
• power whisk
• three electric frying pans
• two broad blade spatulas (a link to an image of a spatula had been thoughtfully inserted into this acceptance criteria)
• power board

As the Digital team, we want to have all the correct ingredients available for preparing and cooking pancake batter, so that we can successfully prepare our pancakes.

Acceptance criteria:

• Self-raising flour
• Back yard chook eggs
• Lactose free milk
• Oil for frying

The Devs were standing by about to plug in the three electric frying pans and ramp them up to 200 degrees. “Wait”, I yelled, “we may have forgotten to articulate one particular story:

As the Digital team, we want to ensure the electrical items we are using are tagged, so that we can comply with the university’s safety standards and so that we do not create an electrical failure, or worse, in the staff kitchen.

A quick consultation and we agreed that the risk of shorting the staff kitchen and leaving everyone else without the use of a microwave was outweighed by the benefit of pancakes. We compromised on using two frying pans.

The event was a huge success, on many fronts.

A team fairly new to Scrum, learnt the rudiments of project inception and story articulation

The team moved from what would be called in the early childhood education arena “parallel play” to “group play”.

We had fun!

We showed those around use that work can be fun.

Most importantly – The pancakes were super good.

What next?

We decided that soggy parmas and limp burgers are sometimes nice, particularly on a Friday when you can get a $10 deal at the local pub.

We also decided that when we do team lunches, we’ll take it in turns to bring in a bunch of moderately healthy stuff we can assemble ourselves. The foodies in the group bring home grown heritage tomatoes, sometimes it’s burritos or bagels and dips.

But it’s the “assemble it ourselves” part that’s important. The interaction of chopping veggies together, chatting while we wait in the queue at the microwave and sitting down to enjoy what we’ve prepared.