During the course, we played the penny-toss agile game. I liked it greatly and thought it was very powerful. So keen to demonstrate value to my employer and having a department meeting today, I thought I'd use this as part of the session.
With the help of our friend google, I found some good sites talking about it and in particular like the ideas discussed on the Scrum Coaching blog. I made a few minor modifications and conducted the following with the team.
Team
- Four Workers
- Four Managers
- One customer
- One president
Organisation
As with the course version and the blog, the workers were timed by the managers and could only (initially) turn over coins using one hand (their left). As we went through the exercise, we made slight modifications to help demonstrate some of the Agile concepts.
Each round started with the customer giving the coins to worker one. To receive value they had to take them from worker four. The president timed the first value received and counted the value.
Rounds
I planned my rounds as follows:
- Round One
- 20 coins, mixed value.
- Batches of 20 coins.
- Left hand
- Round Two
- Repeat of 1st round to see if repetition makes people better
- Round Three
- As before, but with batches of 10. This demonstrated things had improved. Some even said it was "agile", so we had a debate over large projects and smaller ones. The team eventually agreed this wasn't agile.
- Round Four
- 20 coins, mixed value
- Batches of 10 coins
- Removed the left handed impediment. Interesting I asked if they would like to move as part of the table they were on had a broken lip so one of the workers couldn't easily slide the coin off the table, but they were happy as they were.
- Round Five
- This time I removed some low value coins and replaced them with higher value coins. Still 20 in total.
- Batches of 5 coins.
- Both hands allowed
- Round Six
- I let the teams optimise the throughput themselves.
- Still had the 20 high value coins, but let them move (they needed some encouragement that was okay) and let them choose their own batch size, which they kept as 5.
- As the table layout had meant previously they were in a straight line, once they moved they sat around a table. The president and customer where next to each other at the end of the table now. Also the present moved to a tally chart instead of trying to record what had some in.
- Round Seven
- I hadn't planned to do this round, but the workers were not getting very in to it and wanted to try a different batch size. After much debate they ended up on 2.
Results
As you can see from the data, quite a powerful message based on the return value calculated.
In our first try, we only managed to get £4.97 of value for the customer, by the end of round seven, we had £50.82. Even though there was some cheating going on the message was clear. Smaller chunks of high value work having removed impediments and letting the team self organise give much better value.
Lessons from this exercise
Looking back at it, for me it's slightly mixed. While I was trying my Powerful Question technique Geoff and Paul had taught me I wasn't sure they were very good. Although we did have some good (if all be it short) discussion around what was happening.
While on the course we didn't have the customer and president and simply had pennies I was keep to show the value increase that could be achieved. There was a definitive bottleneck at the customer end with counting etc.
Also the group of 10 people involved must of had another 10 watching, I would have done two teams if I had enough money on me (good excuse to buy poker chips).
On the last round, there was a big debate/argue over the batch size. I tried to introduce the fist of five and get agreement, but this didn't really happen with the large (~20) group and got a few jokers giving the "Vs" with a score of two!
I need to work on my facilitation skills for this sort of thing and bring people in more. Also, probably more thought on the benefits we're trying to see on each round to get a better conversation.
Originally I wanted to build some competition with the worker and said if you were the fastest you got a sweet as a prize. This worked well when they only managed one pass, didn't help the argument of maximising resources in the latter rounds.
Speaking with some people after they seemed to enjoy it and felt it useful. Pleased with first stab at this and will try again. Not sure if I'll use same format or keep it more simple; maybe I bit off more than I can chew as a first go.
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