It’s getting close to summer months and many agile devops teams are working hard to close out their Q2 commitments. The summer months are a great time to bring people and teams together to recalibrate on priorities and revitalize their commitment to collaboration.

So this week I’d like to share with you a few simple ideas on how to brings teams together.

1. Review their understanding of customers, personas, and needs – Agile teams that have been heads down and hands-on keyboards for stretches of time can easily lose sight of who their customers are and their primary needs. In some cases, they may never have formalized personas or value propositions. Even when I’ve seen teams led by strong product management organizations, it’s very easy to lose sight of what the level of understanding is around customer needs and what changes have transpired since it was last reviewed.
2. Brainstorm an innovation – In my book, Driving Digital, I share my best agile planning practices that help teams plan out their backlogs and releases. Many teams are forced to go from one sprint to the next and one release to the next one without a lot of time to think, align, and plan. It becomes a grind. But in the summer, consider pulling your teams together and letting them brainstorm and plan a new innovation. Be upfront that the work may not be prioritized, but just thinking about the art of the possible is a healthy way to bring teams together.
3. Pick three KPIs to measure and discuss at retrospectives – Have your teams become data-driven and use retrospectives to drive quantifiable process improvements. You’d be surprised how this reinvigorates teams especially when selected performance indicators align with business needs.
4. Build a dashboard – Aligned with picking KPIs, another great team-building exercise is to enable them to build tools out that help their productivity. Sure you could prioritize a DevOps tool and build or enhance CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, or infrastructure as code. But that’s in the team’s wheelhouse (or should be) and summer is a good time to take them out of their comfort zones. Try having them build one of these devops dashboards that I’ve recommended.
5. Have fun, throw a department potluck lunch or barbecue – One of the best collaborating organization’s that I led through potluck lunches throughout the year and had one large family picnic every summer. By making it a potluck, you can keep company spending to a minimum while celebrating the cultural heritage and cuisines of your teammates. It’s great fun!