Last week, I facilitated a StrategicPlay session at ScanAgile titled “Agile Community Building – Using StrategicPlay with Lego”. Participants co-created a vision of the perfect agile community. We captured the teams presenting their models on video. Enjoy the inspiration!
Olaf Lewitz
agile42 Coach.
Visiting Business Influencer and Linchpin.
My motto is that of NannyMcPhee: "When you need me, but do not want me, I must stay. When you want me, but no longer need me, then I have to go."
Last week, I facilitated a StrategicPlay session at Scan-Agile titled “Agile Community Building – Using StrategicPlay with Lego”. Participants co-created a vision of the perfect agile community. We captured the teams presenting their models on video. Enjoy the inspiration!
The Agile Elephant
The first presentation shows “Agile” on the back of an elephant (the similarity to Discworld was intentional, I heard later) confronting the established mindset... Note the reference to Brian Marick.
Ivory Tower of Knowledge
Valuable ideas are created and brought to the customer. Flowers, a disco ball, and a flag, of course.
In the second lesson I built awareness among the students that a common goal, good communication and teamwork is crucial for the success of a project. Therefore we played the agile42 Scrum Lego City Game.
Ralf Kruse
I'm an agile42 coach. Sometimes I'm excited and sometimes I feel more like Marvin ;-)
Follow me @ralfhh
We formed three teams, who worked together to build a Scrum Lego City.
In fixed timeboxes and with a clear vision, the teams made 3 sprints in order to build the city. They made a Sprint Planning and an estimation but the first sprint was a disaster. A lot of half done User Stories, there where no real integrated results and a lot of wrong assumptions about what was expected.
Why? Because they only worked together as individuals but not together as a team. Everybody was doing what he thought would be best. No right communication and no common understanding ...
Software is getting more and more complex and a lot of projects fail. The students experienced this problem simple exercise: The marshmallow challenge. The students had to build a tower out of spaghettis, cover-tape, a string and with a marshmallow on top in a fixed timebox of 18 minutes.
Ralf Kruse
I'm an agile42 coach. Sometimes I'm excited and sometimes I feel more like Marvin ;-)
Follow me @ralfhh
Well, the exercise worked out as expected. Three of four teams had no tower at the end. Pretty comparable to real software projects :-)
What happend?:
I gave them a complex environment with fixed circumstances and rules. Instead of trying and failing fast and often, they discussed nearly until the timebox was over or they added the marshmallow in the last second and the tower broke under the weight.
After also some other interactive sessions like the well known ball point game the students got the message and learned:
Assumptions lead to wrong results - proof them fast and often
When I studied „Computer Science“, I did not learn much about agile software development, although, according to my curriculum I should have.Now, being an Agile Coach, I like to go back to the roots, helping “Agility” to become a part of the universities topics. My old university, Hamburg University of Applied Sciences (HAW), gives me the chance to do so.
Ralf Kruse
I'm an agile42 coach. Sometimes I'm excited and sometimes I feel more like Marvin ;-)
Follow me @ralfhh
As we all know a lot of projects failed in the past for various reason. Agile methods like Scrum seems to help solving that issue and therefore more and more companies start moving in the agile direction. My goal is to give the students an understanding of agile beyond the pure mechanics, so that they are learning the theory as well as real ways to work agile in order to prepare them for the real work environments. In the lecture we will see and experience well known agile approaches like Scrum and Kanban, get an understanding of their background (Lean ...
Why do adults start playing with LEGO® at work?
StrategicPlay® is a method where you model systems using LEGO® bricks and gain understanding within the team of their parts and interactions. For this understanding to actually lead to new insights and opportunities, the full creative potential of the group is included. Find out how that works with lots of colourful examples!
Olaf Lewitz
agile42 Coach.
Visiting Business Influencer and Linchpin.
My motto is that of NannyMcPhee: "When you need me, but do not want me, I must stay. When you want me, but no longer need me, then I have to go."
Build a tower, higher than everybody else's! Now a raptor, exactly according to specification! And now you've warmed up a bit: Model your biggest challenge for next year!
Why do adults start playing with LEGO® at work? Let's start big...
Systems—Complex, Adaptive, Hard to Understand?
Complex adaptive systems are alluring to human understanding. The world, climate, a swarm of bees... To understand them is an intellectual challenge. I can't escape them—most projects I come across develop complex adaptive (software) systems for complex adaptive (organisational) systems. Wow.
The Ableton team builds a LEGO City as part of the Scrum training.
Garbrand van der Molen
Garbrand van der Molen is managing director of the agile42 Benelux office. His specialities include Product Ownership, User Experience, Marketing and Design.
As always we put theory into practice by building a LEGO City at the end of a Scrum training. The attendees are challenged to build a LEGO City from a Product Backlog in a very limited building time, of course using Scrum. This lets the people really feel what it means to self-organize, to sprint and to have a retrospective. Also working against a Product Backlog and with a Product Owner is something that you need to experience.
In a couple of 5 minute sprints, the teams build, refactor and integrate their LEGO creations. Many aspects of Scrum in software ...
In Groningen we did a Scrum Master & Team Training with Goldmund, Wyldebeast und Wunderliebe and Four Digits, as always culminating in a wonderful Lego city!
Garbrand van der Molen
Garbrand van der Molen is managing director of the agile42 Benelux office. His specialities include Product Ownership, User Experience, Marketing and Design.
In Groningen we did a Scrum Master & Team Training with Goldmund, Wyldebeast und Wunderliebe and Four Digits, as always culminating in a wonderful Lego city!
To have the people at the training really experience what it is like to work as a self organized team we end our training with a Lego city exercise. In this exercise, the people are to organize themselves to build as much as possible from the backlog in a number of 5 minute sprints, coupled with a retrospective and a planning session.
Here we see engineers at work. The backlog is broken up into Requirements ...
Following some more pictures from the Nokia training experience - already more than 15 teams have been trained and coached by agile42 in the last 6 months - were I'll try to point out some more intere...
Andrea Tomasini
I am one of those... which those? Those who built all this, including the wonderful tool Agilo for Scrum. What do you think about it?
Following some more pictures from the Nokia training experience - already more than 15 teams have been trained and coached by agile42 in the last 6 months - were I'll try to point out some more interesting highlights...
Best Practices
Collaboration...
Even in only 5 min. of time, after 2 Sprints and 2 Team Retrospectives the teams greatly improved their ability to self-organize and collaborate. You can't imagine how many hands are building together on the same "story" and how well synchronize the team members are sorting out pieces, putting them on top of each other to achieve the common ...
The Scrum LEGO City Game is about building a nice city with Lego bricks - not a new idea till here - and doing it using as much as possible what learned during the Scrum Training. To create the sense of urgency, agile42 presents the "Product Vision" as to prove to the world that it is possible to build a LEGO city in only 20min. of working time...
Andrea Tomasini
I am one of those... which those? Those who built all this, including the wonderful tool Agilo for Scrum. What do you think about it?
Hi all, as agreed with our classes we decided to initiate a series of posts communicating the highlights of our trainings. In particular we constantly evolve the way we teach Scrum, and we make a lot of effort to make people live the best possible experience in only two days of training.
Introduction
After some years doing training, we came to the point where we really needed to find something that was good enough to put all together in a reasonable time, the theory of Scrum. Well after some reading over the internet and some inspecting & adapting, we came out ...
Olaf Lewitz
Here we see engineers at work. The backlog is broken up into Requirements ...
Even in only 5 min. of time, after 2 Sprints and 2 Team Retrospectives the teams greatly improved their ability to self-organize and collaborate. You can't imagine how many hands are building together on the same "story" and how well synchronize the team members are sorting out pieces, putting them on top of each other to achieve the common ...
