Attention: More explication will follow.
This post is just for all the attendees of Manage Agile Conference in Berlin.
Lego Complexity Game
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Category Archives: Informational Resources
Scrum Guide Game/Workshop
During a workshop with 8 team leads and managers, I realized that in general, they all had a certain knowledge about agile and Scrum but our discussions went around details of the Scrum Roles and Artifacts.
How can I help them to come to a better understanding? Teach them? Send them websites to read? No!
How about a game? Better. Or for those who don’t like games, a workshop.
What you need:
- Copies of the actual Scrum Guide
- Optional (more for reference reasons) copies of the Agile Manifesto and its Principles
- Flipchart, Whiteboard, Post-Its, Markers,…
- Stopwatch
How to:
- Split the team into 5 sub-teams if you have more than 5-6 participants
- Give each one a copy of the Scrum Guide and Manifesto
- Explain by yourself the first paragraphs (Purpose, Definition, Theory)
- Let every team/participant pick a chapter or assign it. Maybe split the Events chapter in two parts – it is pretty long in comparison with the others. If the number of participants/teams is more than 6, let one read the Manifesto and the Principles.
- Give them a timebox of 10 minutes to read, giving the information that later on they have to explain the essence of what they read to all others.
- In the next timebox of 15-20 minutes let them visualize by filling flipcharts, whiteboard, or however they like it.
- Give each participant/team another timebox of 5 minutes to present. It one can not end within the timebox, allow one more minute to finish. Not the timebox is the most important factor here, the information counts. Start with the Manifesto and its Principles and continue with the chapters according their order in the Scrum Guide.
- Optional: After the presentation, the participants can discuss.
In this way, you can let them interactively update their knowledge and understanding about Scrum.
I played it once with a very positive feedback of the participants. I will try it in future with some more teams that show similar symptoms.
BTW, this game also can be played with other documents. I especially think of “Agile Manifesto” and “Kanban Properties and Principles”.
Agile Manifesto
One of the most important websites for agile: http://www,agilemanifesto.org
Often, teams working agile already for a while, tend to forget the intentions and the principles. This could result in a slow but progressive undermining. So, from time to time, it might be a good idea to recall the manifesto. There is a nice game to support this: Pocket-sized Principles.