Columinity — The Name Explained
How the product evolved from “Zombie Scrum Health Checker” into the “Scrum Team Survey” and ended up as “Columinity.”
Columinity helps teams improve by continuously illuminating the quality of their teamwork based on scientific insights. You can diagnose one or many teams, receive evidence-based feedback, and resolve broader organizational issues. Columinity is the rebranded version of the Scrum Team Survey, born from the Zombie Scrum Health Checker.
What started as a fun summer project by Christiaan Verwijs about seven years ago turned into a serious product used by 12,500+ teams worldwide!
In this blog post, we share the roots of Columinity, describe our ideas with the name, and — very importantly — let you hear how to pronounce it. 😃
Zombie Scrum Health Checker
Johannes Schartau and Christiaan came up with the Zombie Scrum 🧟♂️ concept. Check this — now historical — message from Christiaan to Johannes in which he raises the idea. If you can’t read it, make a local copy of the image to enlarge.
In addition, Christiaan developed the Zombie Scrum Symptom Checker in 2019. You can find a detailed description of the tool in this blog post. Our purpose was to help teams distinguish Zombie Scrum from Healthy Scrum. Teams could diagnose how ‘zombified’ they were and learn how to recover from Zombie Scrum.
Although Zombie Scrum is a fun and playful concept, it was already based on a scientific approach. Wherever possible, we’ve relied on existing measures validated in scientific studies. Examples are metrics related to team morale, team composition, team learning, and psychological safety. We used the data gathered by our checker to determine their psychometric reliability and validity and adjusted accordingly.
We also used the data from the tool to write the ‘Zombie Scrum Survival Guide,' published in November 2020. We poured all our creativity, experience, strategies, and insights into a single book to give teams what they need to start recovering.
Scrum Team Survey
Although ‘Zombie Scrum’ is a powerful metaphor, it can also scare teams off. It might be too confronting or give the impression that the tool isn’t a serious instrument for diagnosing the state of your team. While the spirit of the tool remained the same, we rewrote the Zombie Scrum parts into ‘neutral’ Scrum language.
In the meantime, Christiaan initiated a fruitful collaboration with Prof. Dr. Daniel Russo, and they used the tool’s data to write the scientific paper ‘A Theory Of Scrum Team Effectiveness.’ Together, they developed a model with 20+ factors to measure team effectiveness. This model became the backbone of the Scrum Team Survey.
The model offers clear guidance on assessing, diagnosing, and supporting Scrum teams. If a team increases the quality of Sprint Reviews, our model predicts an increase in team morale and stakeholder satisfaction. The same goes for Sprint Goals, Cross-Functionality, Psychological Safety, etc. Similarly, if our model shows that “Responsiveness” scores lower than other factors, this is clearly what all efforts should be focused on if you want to increase team effectiveness.
The model offers focus in a world with thousands of options, approaches, and methods. We use the data to give teams evidence-based suggestions on what to improve.
Agile/Scrum Team Survey?
Quite soon, we noticed that not all teams use Scrum. Yes, indeed, a shocking discovery! Some teams used Kanban and XP or invented an Agile approach themselves. So, we decided to broaden the tool’s scope and make it suitable for Agile teams. When teams identify as an ‘Agile team,’ much of the Scrum language is automatically rewritten into something neutral. For example, Sprint Goals become Shared Goals, and the Sprint Review is changed into Feedback Gathering. This option made the tool relevant for many more teams around the globe!
Columinity
The name “Scrum Team Survey” worked well for us for several years. It started as a survey about Scrum for individual teams. However, our platform matured into something much broader and inclusive.
We now offer diagnostics for Agile teams that don’t use Scrum and even for teams that don’t use Agile. We’ve added a Teams Dashboard and a Coaching Center where the results from a dozen or hundreds of teams can be combined to identify organization-wide issues. We also expanded the evidence-based feedback and added shorter “focus surveys” that can be used more frequently. Finally, we made it easy for teams to invite their stakeholders and management and ask for help.
So, we searched for a more fitting name, which proved to be surprisingly tricky. Many names were already claimed or only for sale at ridiculous prices.
Eventually, we ended up with “Columinity.” It combines three core principles of our platform.
✅ “Co” → Collaboration and community. Work with your team members, stakeholders, and supporters (managers, leaders, coaches) to start improving and start a community to offer support and guidance.
✅ “Luminate” → Shine a light on the tough problems and obstacles in and outside your team
✅ “Infinity” → Don’t do it once, but continuously. Improvement doesn’t stop; it’s an infinite loop!
We realize it’s not the easiest way to pronounce. If you’re struggling, check this video for an example. Yes, it’s a cheap way to lure you into watching our super cool teaser video explaining the product. 😎
The Road Ahead
An advantage of our new name is that it isn’t connected to a specific method, framework, or process. It’s neutral. This allows us to expand Columinity into an ‘umbrella’ with multiple diagnosis instruments and models. A good example is the Teamwork Quality Model. This article describes it in detail. In the future, we might also add the option to measure topics like ‘focus,’ ‘diversity,’ and ‘psychological safety.’
Scientific research will always be the foundation of our work. To boost this, we want to move our research into a public foundation. As part of the foundation, we can work with other statisticians, psychologists, and academics to create reliable surveys and provide evidence-based feedback.
The future is bright. The future is Columinity! 😃
Closing Words: What’s Keeping You?
From experience, we know how hard it can be to drive continuous improvement in your team. There are often a thousand things to improve, but what will be most impactful? We are building Columinity to make this easier for you and your team. It’s free for individual teams. So give it a try and expand from there!
