It’s been a while, yeah a know (pronounce that last bit like the dude from Little Britain 
). Had a great night organized by Agile Holland doing agile games. Tobias Mayer was there as well, as he’s giving a Scrum Master training for the upcoming two days with Michael Franken.
Agile games…. waddayasay? Ok, it was fairly new for me as well, so I can imagine I need to elaborate a bit more. Agile games are about making people aware of things that can be improved about a process. Yup, as broad as that. For instance, let me describe some of the games played.
Penny game
The penny game is about having a table with at least 4 people, that’s the team. Each player is backed by a manager and you’ve also got the customer in the end. How quick is the team able to deliver flipped pennies to the customer. Player 1 starts off with 20 pennies. He’s gotta flip all pennies and then pass them on (in a batch of 20, no cheating!) to the next person in the team. This person flips the pennies back up again so that the queen can watch our pretty faces again. This goes on till the last team member which delivers all the pennies in batch to the customer. The customer is armed with a stopwatch and notes the time the first and last item are delivered. As this is a batch these are of course the same.
Then… smaller batches. You still got 20 pennies, but now lessen the batch size to 5. Flip 5 pennies – pass ‘em on – Flip the next 5 pennies – pass ‘em on, et cetera. This is different to the first round, as:
- The customer is getting the first penny faster than before
- The batch sizes decrease, so the team member in the end of the chain are processing pennies as the first person is still flipping new ones as well. So the total process speeds up as there is less waiting
Next try a batch size of 1. Whow… now the customer is getting stuff real fast. Also, if you’ve got any quality issues it is immediately noticed by a team member as opposed to be hidden in a large batch. Lesson to learn in real life processes: focus on improving one-piece flow. I don’t want to make this blog post toooo long, I might post something about that someday.
Multitasking game
Everybody knows (right?) that multitasking for people is bad. Women can do it better compared to males women consistently say, but still even for them it isn’t the best. This simple game proves that. Draw three columns on a whiteboard. The first column will contain numbers 1-10, the second column will have A-J and the last one will have the Roman numbers I-X. First do them all sequential, that is one column at a time. So note 1, 2, 3 … 10. Next, A, B, C … J and finally I, II, III … X. Time that and note the time passed.
Secondly, do one number of a column at a time. So then you’ll get a 1 first. Move over to the next column for an A. Finish the line in the Roman column with a I. Then a 2, B, II. 3, C, III, … Stop the clock and note the time passed. As you can imagine this will take longer. How come? You constantly context switching. This is only a simple example compared to real life, but your mind has to adapt of processing decimal numbers to Roman numbers. How come in work processes it is still often the case that people believe multitasking is good.
Ball game
Whow… this was fun. Hard to explain it fully at these late hours, but it’s about passing balls (take ping pong balls for easiness sake) through the team as fast as you can. Some rules apply, as you cannot throw them to the people right next to you. Make up a scheme as a team in which you think you can toss around the balls the quickest way possible. I’m not gonna give this away fully, but you suck the first couple of times! Then the product owner comes in stating that there are teams capable of doing this in just a few seconds, while you’re currently doing over 20 seconds. Shoot…. this make creativity rise to the fullest. You will come up with solutions you can’t imagine to let them pass the team. I’m not telling you the secret but I’m proud we made it to 1 (or was it 2) second(s) 
That’s not even all, but need to go to bed as I got an early day tomorrow. It was loads of fun meeting fellow agile minded people. Had a blast being with you tonight. And thumbs up for the organization and for the catering (http://www.eetwijn.com).
