Wow! Agile Games Day Workshop! What a great way to end Agile Tour Toronto! Here’s what people had to say about Gino Marckx and my workshop:

• “Fun, Energizing, Informative I liked adjustments during the day to our plan – nice! Facilitators checked in to see where group was at (all day – during games too)” – Alistair McKinnell, Agile Coach
• “Engaging, Fun, Self-discovery High energy personalities in delivery; not sitting all day and mixing the groups up” – Colin Bowern, Technology Coach and Solutions Architect
• “Fun, Engaging, Educational I liked the split from play to how to facilitate; the mixture of games and game lengths; the flexibility to adapt to the needs of the group” – Sarah, Coach
• “Engaging, Fun, Insightful I liked talking about different roles; it was laid back and fun; good energy and inspiring. – Nick Faulkner, Team Lead
• “Fun, Insightful, Amazing We adjusted as we moved through the day and we took longer where there was value” – Alex Aitken, Consultant

Mistake #1 – Too many games

It all started a week before when participants met online to play the Innovation Games® Buy A Feature game to select what games we would play. Gino Marckx and I provided a menu of 20+ games. The prices? We use the number of minutes for a session. It was a public game, so feel free to check out our results or run your own games.

The first mistake was that we had too high a budget when playing Buy A Feature. I had worked out the approximate number of minutes and decided to budget 30% of the time so we would be a little under the total time. Problem was I forgot to change the default from 40% so we ended up with too many minutes.

How would you recover?

Gino and I used dot voting to prioritize the games selected so that we would play the most important ones first. Here is what we came up with. (Note: no votes for team games since we did this right at the start before the voting). The games are listed from top to bottom based on “ROI” (dots/time).

Mistake #2 – Budgeted times off by 40%

As the day progressed, it became clear that the time budgets we had allocated were too low. Way too low.

How do we know this? Well, having just finished a Kanban workshop, I created a control chart to track actual time in comparison to budget time. See photo below.

Root causes?

1. When we were having valuable debriefs we kept going, rather than keep to our timebox.
2. After each game was finished, we had a game facilitation discussion to talk about when you might play the game, setup needed, tips and tricks, etc. People found this very valuable.
3. The games are tiring and people needed more breaks than planned.
4. The two big games – Business Value Game (BVG) and Yellow Brick Road really benefit from having 2 hours instead of 1.5 hours. This is consistent with my earlier playings of BVG.
5. Some of the games we were less familiar with.

The Games We Played

Here is a quick review of the games we played and when to use them. The full list of games is here.

Team Formation and Energizing

Constellations (30 min) is used to share team perspectives around values and beliefs. The information allows team members to help each other through challenge areas and provide hooks to talk about problems. We also played Tribes as a warmup but don’t have a description for this.

MarketPlace (60+ min) is used to inform team members about skills help by one another. This helps on many levels. First, you know where people are coming from. Second, you learn what skills and capabilities they bring to the project. Third, you may notice other things about them that can help the project succeed. Fourth, appreciating skills creates a powerful connection between the team members.

Play these games with all team members when you start working with them.

Product Backlog Management

Business Value Game (90+ min) helps players understand different views of value and think about the challenges of modeling business value. In particular it gets players to think about how to keep customers happy and balance technical improvements with feature delivery. It also hammers home the importance of reviewing acceptance criteria. Play this game with Product Managers/Owners and everyone involved in backlog prioritization.

Emergent Design

Marshmallow Challenge (45 min) helps players understand the benefits of incremental and evolutionary design. Teams that balance planning with experiments and learning about the problem domain do a lot better than teams that do a lot of upfront planning and no learning. Play this game to shift away from Big Design Up Front. This is suitable for all team members and especially important for Product Managers/Owners and Architects/Designers.

Developing Coaching Skills

Yellow Brick Road: Fresh Insights through peer coaching (90+ min) allows people to develop their coaching and observation skills so that they can help one another. A side effect of the game is that people can solve real problems. This is a good game to play with ScrumMasters, internal coaches and managers.

Value of working in small batches

Penny Game (30 min) is a fast and effective demonstration of how customer responsiveness can be improved through delivery of work in small batch sizes. It also highlights the importance of identifying organizational impediments to productivity and selecting high priority stories first to maximize ROI. I like to play the game when introducing teams to Agile and Lean/Kanban – especially to motivate user stories vs. big requirements.

Concurrent Projects delay delivery

Name Game (10 min) shows how delivering to multiple client projects at a time will give the perception of responsiveness but will lengthen delivery times. Great game to play with managers, project managers and Product Managers/Owners.

Multi-tasking reduces effectiveness

Multi-tasking (10 min) is a quick pen and paper exercise that illustrates how multi-tasking reduces the effectiveness for an individual. Play it with managers and team members that think working on multiple projects or multiple tasks is a good idea.

Some photos from our day of play

Business Value Game

Marshmallow Challenge and Marketplace

John Goodsen and I set out to deliver a great one day Kanban workshop as part of Agile Tour Toronto 2010 and we hit this one out of the park.

What People had to Say about the Training

• “Engaging, Practical, Fundamental I liked the flow from concepts to games/practice; moved quickly; teamwork/collaborative learning.” – Alex Zeldin, Manager Planning and Business Solutions
• “Wicked, Awesome, Cool I liked the games and the Q&A session at the end.” – Trevor Ramoutar, Project Manager
• “Interactive, Informative, Practical A very lively workshop – you could feel the experience the trainers have! Thanks a lot.” – Hedi Buchner, ScrumMaster and coach.

Recipe for Success

• Two coaches who have different experiences, points of view and are ready to experiment (See: Agile Coaches are like Superheroes)
• A strong desire to apply Training from the Back of the Room (See: Thought you were a good trainer? Guess Again!)
• A group of motivated learners

How I trained from the back of the room and loved it

If you are unfamiliar with this book, please check out my book review and mindmaps.

Below are the exercises we use from the book. Most of what we used was from Connections and Conclusions. We played lot’s of games for concrete practice. We had limited use of slides (see bottom of page) to illustrate concepts. My overall take is that we covered less and did it with much higher quality.

Introduction

Connections – “PostIt/What’s in it for me?” (p.99)

• Hand draw poster with “What’s in it for me?”
• As people arrive, have them write WIIFM on PostIts with their Name.

Connections – “Think then Ink” (p.98) + Knowledge line

• “Think about what you already know about this topic.  Write three facts on an index card.
• Form a line from most to least knowledgable about Kanban/Agile to least.
• Share your facts on index card with your neighbours.
• In a line from least to most, everyone can share one thing with the class

Lean: Waste & Value Stream Mapping

Connections – Card Carousel (p.106) – 2 minutes

• Pass around cards with topics written on them: Value Stream Mapping, Muri, Mura, Muda, Value, Toyota Production System, Waste

Oops – forgot to integrate cards when reviewing material.

Idea – Would have been good to have people make notes during waste discussion of what they have seen in their workplace and then make a top 10 list.

Flow Basics

Conclusions – same exercise as at the beginning. Wow, what great discussion. People really remember this part.

Closing of the Day

Get Kanban Game

The whole workshop was organized around playing Russell Healy’s GetKanban Game in the afternoon. The morning was all about layering in basic lean concepts followed by a quick intro to Kanban – just enough to play the game. Afterwards, we covered various topics through parking lot (Q&A).

I give the game a thumbs up and will definitely use it again. One important note that John and I clued into is that the game presupposes that people understand breaking work into small batches/tickets and limiting work in process. That’s why we played several games in the morning to establish the basics of flow. See slides for specifics.

Slides

Eating our own dog food

Yes, John and I eat our own dog food. We used Kanban to visualize the work we needed to do to prepare for the workshop. Below is a snapshot of our Kanban board we created in google docs. See Henrik Kniberg’s sample.

Thanks

John and I would like to thank everyone who shared material with us to prepare our slides – notablly Henrik Kniberg, Mary Poppendieck and Jon Stahl.

I would also like to thank Russell Healy for discussions on rule variants of the Kanban Game.

After reading Roger Brown’s post – Adventures in Accelerated Learning – I decided I had better read Sharon Bowman’s Training From the Back of the Room. The book has really helped me improve my training style and I look forward to taking Sharon’s training to get an immersive experience. I am writing about this now since I had a chance to put it into practice on my Kanban 101 training. In this post, I want to share the key concepts from the book.

The visual note below is an example of an exercise I did when reading the book – “1 minute concept review”. It took me considerably longer than a minute, but now I have a clear picture of what the book is about. I knew some of this stuff when I was a teaching assistant in university where I was part of a program to help improve teaching skills. Sharon’s stuff is way more powerful.

The 4 C’s

1. Connections
2. Concepts
3. Concrete Practice
4. Conclusions

Sharon uses the 4 C’sas a way to think about training and to help learners engage with new information. The book contains links back to research on learning and neurology.

The reason I really like the book is that it is chock full of example exercises. These are easy to understand and apply. So it is theory + practice.

4MAT

The 4 C’s are a simplified model of the 4MAT system of learning that I learned a while back but found difficult to apply effectively. So if you are looking for a richer model consider this one.

What Sharon’s book brings to the table is a model that is easy to understand and apply. And great examples. So give it a read if you do any training.