Team Building Exercises

My current manager recently posed several questions to the team that he wanted candid responses too. He's new to the organization, but he seems genuine in his efforts to improve our process. Several of his questions have gotten me thinking, which I'll turn into blog posts over the course of the month. The first I wanted to discuss is about team building exercises.

My manager asked for suggestions for a team building exercise that we could do. He never explained what he hoped to get out of the exercise but I'm sure it is the generic "get to know each other, build team cohesiveness" mumbo jumbo. On previous team outings we've played laser tag and gone bowling. I believe the team building value in these activities was minimal and was mostly chosen for the entertainment value.

So, what activities could a development team do together in the sake of team building? Here's a few suggestions that I have, though I've not been able to put into practice.

One idea is team lunches. Getting everyone together in one room for an hour in a relaxing environment can be good for the team. The boss doesn't even have to pick up the tab (though it doesn't hurt). An alternative to this would be a lunch pitch-in, where everyone brings in something to eat.

Another alternative is to have a brown bag lunch every so often and select someone to present information on a specific topic. Perhaps a particular design pattern, or new technology, or a new programming technique could be demonstrated. Maybe there is some new internal software being developed that the team could benefit from learning about in a relaxed setting.

If your development projects are like mine, they could use some internal documentation. You can address this issue as a team building exercise by setting up a documentation tool, like a wiki, and ask the developers to submit articles to the wiki. So long as the productivity doesn't suffer you could even create a contest for the best written article, or the best diagram.

Estimation poker itself can be a fine team building tool as well, and it provides some useful output; Estimations for code changes that have been hashed out in a group. Some more information on estimation poker can be found here.

Finally, my current manager has started a new team building exercise with us, he gives us a series of hints about a person on our team and we have to guess who it is. We've done this a couple of times and is a great way to learn about each other.

What team building exercises have you attempted or thought of?