Niko Niko Calendar

What is a Niko Niko Calendar?

A Niko Niko Calendar is a simple way to give team members an opportunity to express how they’re feeling about how things are going, a regular (often daily) cadence.

What’s the Benefit?

A Niko Niko calendar can help a team in the following ways:

  • Provides visibility into team happiness on a frequent cadence
  • Can help build empathy and trust
  • Serves as potential raw material for team continuous improvement conversations, such as during retrospectives

When?

A team might choose to try an experiment with a Niko Niko Calendar at any time, for instance, to gather data about a particular hypothesis, such as why team happiness or unhappiness goes through particular peaks and valleys.

Who Attends?

There are two answers to this question:

  • Team members make individual entries in the Niko Niko Calendar on an agreed-upon cadence
  • A facilitator (often a Scrum Master, for Scrum teams) joins the team to talk about patterns or other insights are visible based on the Niko Niko Calendar entries

Inputs

  • A blank Niko Niko Calendar

Outputs

  • A completed Niko Niko Calendar

Preparing for Success

To prepare for usage of a Niko Niko Calendar:

  • Describe the technique to the team, and get their buy-in on usage of it
  • Consider framing usage of the technique as a one-time experiment (for example, during a single Sprint, for Scrum teams), to give the team a chance to evaluate whether they think it is helpful

Execution

When working with a virtual team:

  1. Download the Management 3.0 Excel template, choose a different template (there are many available online), or make your own.
  2. Rename the file and upload it to a location where all team members can access it.
  3. During the workday, each team member shades the cell on the row with their name, and the column representing the current date, where:
    1. Green = awesome day
    2. Yellow = good day
    3. Orange = not so good day
    4. Red = horrible day
  4. (optional) Team members enter a comment in the applicable cell to add context, if desired. (Or, modify the format of the template to add space for comments in a separate column.)

When working with a collocated team (option 1):

  1. Draw the Niko Niko calendar and post it in a shared team workspace.
  2. During the workday, each team member places a post-it note or a dot in the cell on the row with their name, and the column representing the current date, where:
    1. Green = awesome day
    2. Yellow = good day
    3. Orange = not so good day
    4. Red = horrible day
  3. (optional) If there is a space for comments on the Niko Niko calendar, team members can add them.

When working with a collocated team (option 2):

  1. Put a box or other container with a slot in the top workspace, along with stacks of colored tokens (e.g., poker chips).
  2. During the workday, each team member takes a token and places it in the sealed container, where the color of the token represents:
    1. Green = awesome day
    2. Yellow = good day
    3. Orange = not so good day
    4. Red = horrible day
  3. The facilitator (often the Scrum Master, for Scrum teams) collects the tokens at the end of the Sprint, and uses them as a data point for the Sprint Retrospective.
  4. (optional) The team might also choose to create a space on a white board or flip chart paper where team members can write general observations about the Sprint, as it progresses.

References

 

 

 

X