Last week there was a conversation within an organization I’m currently working on with agile implementation in creative services industry.

The key point was if there was a way of introducing a break between sprints; this is something that came out from a retrospective. The fact was that the team requested it, but the product owner was not in that same page, he actually didn’t want any break at all between sprints. His arguments were: We need sustainable peace and spend time doing work.

After discussing with both parties and having them exposing their point of views, I gave my personnal opinion to that:

I personally don’t think that having a break between sprints will attempt against sustainable peace. Sustainable peace is about rhythm, heart beats; it’s not about “continuous development”. I mean, we can have a fixed length sprint without alterations and a fixed length break; let’s say half a day. If we do that and preserve it through time, then we’re still having sustainable peace, correct?

Another totally different situation might be if we have random length breaks; like half a day after the first sprint, two days after the second sprint and one day after the third one. This will absolutely attempt against sustainable peace.

On the other hand, when talking about “continuous development”, I realized the PO was talking about getting people producing creative deliverables all time (designing, drafting, creating, etc)… ok, I would be very careful on that because people still need to be trained, regardless the industry they are at.

I personally come from the systems engineering industry, one in which anyone can be turned into a vintage programmer if he don’t get training or refreshes on latest technologies. Of course, this is somehow extreme, but it happens to all people regardless their industry.

It didn’t took too much discussion until we found a shared agreement on breaks between sprints: we decided to have the demo & retrospective meeting during the morning and a free space during the afternoon, there might be no planned work for those 4 hours at the end of each sprint (every 2 weeks).

What are they going to be used for? Well, there will be happening three different things during that time:

  • Have the team attend training sessions or prepare training session on industry updates or
  • Have someone relevant to the work they do to attend and have a discussion session with them  in order to get updated and discuss about new approaches, new movements or latest industry events or
  • Have the people contribute to the corporate blog, with an interesting article, or get them participate in online blog conversations, getting benefit for the web 2.0 opportunities

We’ll be monitoring closely how this goes… I’m very excited on this approach. I’d certainly recommend a break between sprints with this characteristics. :)