The Job Title Game

It’s good practice for companies to try to keep the number of official job roles to a minimum. It saves on administration and prevents people from boxing themselves in their role. In this exercise, we’ll flip this concept and see, if everyone can get a very specific or even unique job title. This is best suited as an icebreaker for a retrospective.  Timing: 5-10 minutes  …

Penny Flow

Summary: This game is based on The Penny Game.  I’ve seen it in various incarnations, but this is based on the original concept.  Instead of simply showing how batch size affects throughput, this game has been heavily modified to give several additional lessons.  Attendees can expect to learn about Agile’s roots in Lean manufacturing, batch size theory, single piece flow, being adaptive to change, quick…

Agile Scrum framework at glanceIntroducción al framework Agile Scrum Intro au framework Agile Scrum

Purpose The goal of the game is to start the conversation within the team about their development process, in this case, by using the Agile-Scrum framework. By asking open ended questions, the facilitator would help the team discover areas of improvement identified by the team, help with clarifying some concepts and show the team how easy it’s to inspect and adapt their own development process.…

Telestrations for Teams

Timing: Really depends on the group size, but I’d allow at least 2 hours for a group of 10 to play three rounds.   Materials: The board game Telestrations. There are two versions of this game, an eight player version and a 12 player party-pack version for larger groups. https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/46213/telestrations It’s available online (Amazon, etc), or from most decent shops which sell board games.  …

The Teamwork Oscars

This exercise was created for practicing Benne and Sheats’s group roles (although it might be adapted for any other similar classification). It does so by asking teams to resolve text puzzles (derived from popular teamwork fables) while at the same time team members are acting various group roles. Based on their performance the teams (as well as the individuals) might be awarded Oscars. The exercise…