03 Sep 2025 - Matt Lucht
This week we held a team retrospective, expertly led by Jamie Doyle. I won’t go into all of the specifics, retros are a safe place for the team to talk openly without scrutiny from outside, but one of the things that we discussed was our team name.
Team names might seem trivial, but when your team’s focus evolves significantly, the wrong name can become a real barrier.
We currently go by the name “Team Invite”. This made perfect sense when our remit was about helping to shift to digital invitations across all screening pathways (breast, cervical, bowel, etc.).
It made a little less sense when our focus changed to be around all communications for breast screening, for example, as well as invitations dealing with reminders, reschedules and potentially results.
And now that our remit is even broader, where we’re considering the end to end experience from a participant perspective, it makes even less sense.
Whilst it might not be the biggest challenge we face, a team name that doesn’t reflect our full remit has led to some trickier conversations around the potential scope of our work.
As a team we see each other every morning on stand-ups, we talk regularly throughout the day on Slack, MS Teams and occasionally, in person. We know that we’re a team.
But having a name helps provide some identity, it encourages togetherness and good team work. When the team is doing well it boosts morale and a sense of pride in what we do. And when the team hits that inevitable stumbling block we can come together and tackle that problem as a group.
So I think that team names are important.
Another question might be whether the team name needs to describe the work that we’re doing, or is a codename just as good. We could, for example, simply be Team Purple!
A name that describes what we do has some advantages in that it helps people from outside the team know what to come to you for. It also gives people who are joining the team a sense of what they’re getting involved with.
But if the team focus changes, like ours has, then that name may no longer be as relevant and you might be left having to re-define yourself.
At MHCLG I led the Data Standards team. We’d often get asked to help with anything that involved either data, or taking a standardised approach. Some of what we got asked to help with was a fair way outside of our remit, but it did mean that we were brought into conversations that we’d otherwise not have known about. It didn’t cause any major headaches, but meant we needed a bit more rigour to our front-door process.
Coming up with the right name isn’t always as easy as it might seem.
At HM Courts & Tribunal Service I was a part of the team designing the Apply for Probate service. We sat within the HMCTS Reform programme and were responsible for all aspects of the probate service. So being called “the probate reform” easily distinguished us from the teams working on divorce, or small claims.
Whereas within Digital Prevention Services Portfolio (DPSP) there are a few different teams who are working on different aspects of the breast screening pathway – so that makes coming up with a suitable name a little bit trickier.
With a view of no idea being a bad one, we’ve started bouncing around some potential names. Any thoughts or suggestions are welcome!