Personal Sprint goals

This post is part of 101 ideas for agile teams.

Context

A team willing to learn and get better.

Action

Every team member picks a personal learning goal for the Sprint that makes her or him more valuable for the team. The team discusses picked goals and achievements in the Sprint retrospective.

Typical goals are improvements in engineering-skills, tool mastery or domain knowledge. Achieving the goal should make the team member a bit more efficient or effective.

Examples: learn IDE short-cuts, focus on giving good method/variable/test/class names, focus on making small methods, a single practice from the Clean Code Cheat Sheet.

What you gain

Intrinsic motivation (mastery).

Better distribution of know-how and skills in the team (T-shape).

How to strengthen

Visualize personal Sprint goals.

Risks

Goals that do not provide value to the team. Discuss goals as team in retrospective.

While learning, the team performs slower. Make clear that not learning anything makes the team even slower in the long run.

Team members may have difficulties to admit that they failed their goals. Make clear, that this is absolutely voluntary, but great fun when progress gets visible.

More ideas at 101 ideas for agile teams

Many thanks to bbv Software Services for making this blog post possible.