The latest developer team building tool…
… is the allen key!
Last week I crazy managerial urge to do some team building – so when Ikea delivered some shelves to hold all of our Java technology books (“this one”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0471463620/102-1174643-1849716?v=glance is the best 
) I suddenly had the brilliant idea to turn the construction into a team building exercise.
Ok – so I got a lot of odd looks from the “Confluence”:http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence development team along the lines of “you want us to do what? you know you pay me to write code. I’m good with my hands, but only on a keyboard”… and all that sort of thing, but it was a good idea. Besides, it saved me and Ben building another f’ng bookshelf!
And so it was decided – there would be a spontaneous developer team building race, pair constructing IKEA furniture. Craziness!
How did it go? Fantastically! It’s good to get away from the PC and exercise the mind in other ways I think. Anytime a team spends away from the office doing things as a group can only help increase the communication bonds. Perhaps the biggest challenge was deciding who should pair with who after the 4-way scissors-paper-rock battle (yes, I know 4-way doesn’t work).
Here are some pics I snapped on “Charles’”:http://fishbowl.pastiche.org digital camera.
Team Youth (Dave and Jens) attacking their box:
Team Experience (Charles and Nick) starting constrution, with Charles in his action man pose:
The JIRA team quitely ignoring all the noise we’re making (minus Scott who’s on a boys-only jaunt in Vietnam):
Et voila! One of the finished products during one our planning meeting, supporting the phone and projector:
Next time someone tells you team building is a crock, hand them an allen key and lay down the challenge.
