Agiles Games

Agile Games
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Play is a profoundly powerful tool to achieve business results. Agile Games are not only fun stuff. They are serious tools to solve issues in management, product development and team building.
The term “agile” is more about delivering the highest business value possible faster by focusing on people and continuous improvement.

In fact, Agile Games are a kind of facilitated workshops ranging from group exercises (lasting from 10min, 20min, or 30min,…) up to full-fledged team workshops which may last several hours or days.

The “players”, i.e. the workshop participants, are a carefully selected group of stakeholders, including customers and subject matter experts. All work together to discover, create, verify, and document predefined deliverables.

Agile Games have with Innovation Games in common to be directed by a facilitator whose responsibilities include:

• explaining the participants the game(s) to be played;
• controlling the pacing and tempo of each game;
• monitoring participation levels; and,
• managing time of the overall game-play event.

Michael Sohota gave at agilitrix.com  a grid of  some Agiles Games know at 2010. The map shows four dimensions:  People, System, Concepts, “Experiencing our reality”.

Agile Games Grid, Copyright: agilitrix.com

• People – Agile Games about people learning individual skills or learning about individuals
• System — Agile Games about the team or organization
• Concepts — Agile Games primarily about teaching concepts or ideas
• “Experiencing our reality” — Agile Games the help us understand ourselves and our context

Games for People and Concepts
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• Multi-tasking (10 min)
• Collaborative Origami – collaboration & communication (15min)
• Yellow Brick Road: Fresh Insights through peer coaching (90min)
• Pair Draw (30min)
• 99 Test Balloons – acceptance testing (30min)
• Go! – A game for illustrating the agile mindset, your brain on Scrum (10min)

Games for System and Concepts
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• Bang For The Buck Prioritization – backlog organization and prioritization – (60 min).
• The Backlog is in the Eye of the Beholder – organizing backlog from stakeholder view (40min).
• Business Value Game – helps understand differing sources of value. (90min)
• Marshmallow Challenge – understand benefits of incremental design (45min)
• XP Game, XP Game (Scrum variant) – basics of iterative development and acceptance testing (180min)
• Penny Game – Flow of value, process improvement (40 min?)
• Bottleneck Game – understanding process and applying theory of constraints (90min)
• Name Game – Limit concurrent projects (10min)
• Movers and Shapers – team dynamics (10min)

System and Reality
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• Ball Point Game – process improvement, teamwork – simpler than penny game (40min)
• Value Stream Mapping – hmmm. not a game really
• Leadership Game – self-organization and leadership styles (180min)

People and Reality
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• Constellations – Share team perspectives (30min)
• Improv Games and Hypnotizing hypnotist – Get better at collaboration and innovation (10min to ?)
• Market Place – share skills with team members (30+ min)

Weblinks
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Agile Game Collections:

• Michael Tarnowski: Agile Games evening Xing User Group Agile Rhein-Main
• Michael Tarnowski, My own Games Collection

• Probably the best place to go to find an Agile Game is TastyCupcakes.org – it’s a community-driven and has an ever-growing collection of games.

• There is also a Google Group
• Another Agile Games Collection: Agile games of agilecoach.net
• One more Agile Games Collection: Jurgen De Smet’s game collection

Other informations:

• How to create your own game
• Learn to coach and observe through play
• Learning Through Games
• Lego Serious Play
• Playing at Work. Games That Deliver Value
• Team and pair games for building collaboration
• Encourage Playing Games at Office
• Online-Shop for playing Agile Games
• Being Agile when Designing and Playing Agile Games
• How to Facilitate a Great Game Debrief