“Hitting the Target” — Business Value in Mission-Focused Organizations

How should organizations prioritize work in the face of conflicting goals and metrics? Help more people? Minimize delays? Prosecute more crimes? Lower costs? In this game participants will experience a dice-based simulation that has been created to explore these questions by examining the impact of these decisions on the performance of organizations in changing environments.

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…

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.  …

User Stories vs Requirements

Nov 2017: Sorry for the broken links…when Dropbox nuked their public folder support, this link went with it! It’s fixed! Disclaimer: I learned this exercise from Sarah Klarich, I don’t know where she learned it from (Teresa Carlisle according to the document author?) but it’s extremely effective at communicating why User Stories work better than requirements! Hint, it’s NOT about the User Story! Materials Needed…

Fellowship Of The Goal – Gamify The Cardwall

Gamification can lead to higher levels of collaboration and engagement with teams. On many occasions, I’ve come across prescriptive workflows which completely disengage teams and those teams don’t challenge the tools or process they inherit. Gamification and customisation helps teams care and take ownership of their system and workflow to help the team unite behind common goals and have fun with their workflow. This game…