What does... "sprint" actually mean?

Gold. Gold. Gold. The Swiss track and field athletes sprinted from one gold medal to the next at the European Championships in Rome. It used to be different. There were hardly any medals won in athletics - and if there were, then certainly not in sprinting. And back then, the word was not used as much as it is today. Anyone who can estimate how much strength, energy and time someone like Mujinga Kambundji or Timothé Mumenthaler invests in order to produce a best performance for 20 seconds should be a little more economical with the use of this word. After all, it has evolved from its origins in fast running and jumping into a versatile metaphor for intensive, focused efforts in various areas. And that's annoying.

Scrum is to blame for the fact that we now have to call everything a sprint. When our industry had to say goodbye to the idyllic waterfall models at the end of the 1990s and Scrum was introduced, the pace accelerated and by the mid-noughties, strolling or strolling was a thing of the past.

The ideal world of the project managers suddenly became rough, fast and forward-moving. Like a bunch of dirty rugby players, they have been gaining meter by meter ever since and call it sprinting. Or an agile approach. Today, people are sprinting all the time, interacting in dailies and weeklies and placing user- or client-defined alignments and adjustments in any order, so that the projects end up looking like trampled rugby pitches and are not completed on time despite all the running around.

Not all that glitters is gold

In the context of agile project management and Scrum, sprints are used to describe a short, focused period of work aimed at making progress quickly and delivering frequently. That's the theory. In practice, however, it's more like the coaches of Mujinga Kambundji or Timothé Mumenthaler would have them run up and down the 200 meters the whole time in training and then think that they still had the necessary strength to win gold at the European Championship final.

Sprint is therefore not the golden egg of project management and developers. But it is many other things. Sprint, for example, is also the name of a low-cost airline in the USA that some people are afraid to book with because it is always late or flights are canceled without good reason. But it is cheap, just like the DIY websites that are never finished. Sprint was also the name of the telecommunications company in the same country, which was founded in 1987 and sold to T-Mobile, this extremely successful subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom, in 2020. The local company Swisscom also dreams of such success. Its efforts to assert itself on the domestic market are already being hamstrung by confusing and annoying its customers with cryptic subscription renewals. But this year, like the track and field athletes, it has also scored a coup in Italy. A binding agreement was reached with Vodafone Group Plc to take over 100% from Vodafone Italia for a purchase price of 8 billion euros. Whether this is also a gold medal remains to be seen.

* Benno Maggi is co-founder and CEO of Partner & Partner. He has been eavesdropping on the industry for over 30 years, discovering words and terms for us that can either be used for small talk, pomposity, excitement, playing Scrabble, or just because.