THE AGILE UNITED GAME

Imagine you have some teams who have to learn something. Lets say they have to transform to Agile teams.

They all work on the same product and they all have to go their way together.

Find out what the learning achievements for the teams should be. 

Again lets say, they have to learn the basics of Kanban. An tool to evolve processes in an evolutionary way.

Writ down challenges, or lets say Moves the teams have to do/achieve in order to learn Kanban.

For example:

Find a big enough wall to display your current working process. Start at the point where your team gets a requirement and end, when the requirement is finished. Done. Finito.

To not overload the first step, decide what only Item your Kanban Board should represent. Could be just Bugs, User Stories etc.

Then work with the board for 2 weeks. Do not change anything in your process. Just observe what happens.

Write this on a Move Card.

This could be a small Move to start learning Kanban.

So, every team gets the same Move card at the same time. And every team decides for themselve if and when they want to start performing the Move.

In the background where everybody can see it, the Gamemaster (You), hangs a big Puzzle with missing parts. Every team represents some missing parts of the Puzzle.

Every time a team has finished his Move they earn their Puzzlepart what they put into the missing spot.

It is important, that the Puzzle indicates what team has finished his move and what team don't.

I recommend to start with no more than three missing Puzzle parts per team in one Puzzle.

Now comes the obstacle:

Whenever a team has finished all his Moves from the Puzzle it cannot evolve any further and cannot go to the next Puzzle with more Moves until every team has finished all their Moves for the current Puzzle. 

So, they have to help the other teams finishing their parts. Otherwise they cannot proceed becoming more Agile or learn more about Kanban.

This has to be supported from the organization, of course. They really have to want their teams to have a constant and collective pace in evolving and getting better, so the whole organisation can become more Agile.

AddOns:

Puzzlepiececolors:

You can get grey, colored and golden pieces.

grey = minimal requirements are achieved. Lowest Level of Achievement

colored = great achievement. Your team does more than the requirement asked for

golden = Highest degree on this level. Your team did an excellent job, maybe found new ways in doing their work, new moves invented, etc

Challenges:

A team can invite other teams in doing a challenge for a move.

For example:

Likechallenge - Both team have to publish the steps about their learning steps, their obstacles and how they overcome them. For one week both teams earn Likes for their postings an the team with the most Likes wins a special puzzle piece.

This promotes that the teams have to sell their work to teams that are not directly involved, in order to create curiosity about what they are doing.

Form time to time, new puzzles to solve emerge and every team is free to attend, but the masterway for the whole unit should be clear, in order to have a constand and stabile learning progress.