In the last couple of teams I’ve worked with we’ve had some time critical projects to deliver with extremely tight deadlines to hit. As a Scrum Master or Coach during times like these you need to bring a little something extra, in order to keep people up beat and focused on the tasks at hand.

Something I’ve used during times like I’ve described above is a team hooter (or bike horn). The idea is as you finish a story (or move it to done) then you should press the hooter to let you team mates and the people around you know that we’ve made some progress. This is usually followed by a round of applause from everyone in a show of support.

It’s amazing how infectious something this simple can be and quite interesting how people really do get into it. Just today I had another team ask me where I got my hooter from as they wanted to do the same thing. We then laughed about the possibility of doing a Mexican wave of applause when a big milestone is hit.