One early, easy win to be had when organizing a new Scrum team is to let the team members name their team.  It takes less than five minutes out of the first Scrum planning meeting, but gets team building and camaraderie off to a great start.

Encourage everyone to come prepared with at least one name suggestion each, along with a slogan for each name.  Winning names always seem to have a catchy slogan.

The last team-naming exercise that I ran quickly boiled down to a runoff between the only two names that had a slogan:

• Team Rubicon — There’s no turning back now!
• Team Convex — Deadlines are closer in mirror than they appear.

Timebox the voting to 5 minutes.  Have everyone quickly write their suggestions on the board and give explanations, if needed.  Then, use whatever voting scheme you like.  A popular one is where everyone gets three votes.  They can cast one vote for each of three different names, or cast all three votes on one name — their choice.

A word or warning: If your organization already has a lot of project code names flying around, then naming the teams, too, can get confusing.  If that’s the case, then see if you can get the developers who will be working on a project involved in coming up with the project code names.