Agile Simulations - what's it all about?

Like many Scrum Master, Coaches, Facilitators and other agilists, I'm a great fan of gamification to get agile points across. There's nothing quite like getting the lego out to explore team dynamics or sitting the C-suite round a table with a set of coins to demonstrate outcome-driven delivery.

Now, these activities are great, but how do you do them with remote teams? how do you get everybody involved if, as looks likely, more people will be working at home in the future? Also, many of these activities, while convincing to some, can fall a bit flat as the audience don't see them as relevant; either the roles and artefacts in the game are not what are used in the company, or the audience are sceptical because they believe the parameters have somehow been "fixed" to make the demonstration work.

This led me to explore the idea of writing software simulations of some of these activities to address these issues. Hence Agile Simulations; a set of apps that run these games in a browser to not only demonstrate the concepts, but also allow customisations to address any scepticism.

More details at https://agilesimulations.co.uk/

The Simulations

The simulations, and the games they are based upon, are designed to try and answer some of the big - although admittedly less frequently asked - questions in the agile realm. Questions such as:

• Is pairing better than not pairing, in terms of quality, cost and time to develop?
• What is the best pairing strategy in a multi-skilled team? What is the best strategy to acheive cross-functionality?
• Why order the backlog by value if everything has to be delivered anyway?
• What is the best strategy to approach work in an environment of interdependent teams?

The Coin Game Simulation. This activity is described in detail in The Coin Game - a simple but effective way to demonstrate agility.... I have used it for years to demonstrate how agile delivery reduces risks and maximises outcomes for customers. It uses coins as a proxy for work completed in a project and demonstrates how surprisingly quickly value can be delivered if the work is approached in the correct way. I would always recommend doing this "live" for maximum impact, but the simulation allows you to tailor it to use the exact roles in your organisation, and to tweak the value being delivered to more closely match your project profiles. And, of course, to run it remotely.

The Interdependent Agile Teams Simulation. This simulation is explored in detail in this session from Agile Cambridge 2018 Efficiencies in interdependent agile teams. Most people would agree that the removal of all dependencies between teams is the way to maximum efficiency, but, in the real world, for a variety of reasons, this is not always possible or sensible. Hence this simulation explores different strategies to factor work from outside a team into a team's work. Remarkably, always doing other teams' work before your own is significantly more effective; up to 3 time more! This simulation demonstrates this and allows you to tweak various parameters, for instance levels of interdependence, to fully explore the concept.

The Pairing Simulation. Pairing has its roots in Extreme Progtramming (XP) and was originally proposed as a way to increase code quality and reduce defects. However, it can be used in a much wider sense to increase general knowledge sharing across a domain and move teams to be truly cross-functional. Further, it can help cement a common vision/goal for a team and lead to more coherent and understandable solutions. This simulation allows exploration of this concept by allowing tweaking of team size and skill makeup, backlog makeup, and - most importantly - pairing strategies, for instrance, should we pair the best skills for the work? the best learning opportunities? pair randomly? In addition to pairing, should you swap pairs to increase the knowledge share? This simulation allows you to explore all these strategies and understand their effects.

Lego Flow. We've just started on this, and it's getting very exciting! Watch this space! Get in contact if you want to know when we have something to demo...

How To Use The Simulations

The simulations are all written in Vue.js and native Javascript, so can simply be npm install-ed and run stand-alone in a browser. The idea wold be to use them in one of two ways:

1. To demonstrate the concepts, e.g .to C-Suite or other management forums to get the concepts across as part of transformation efforts or refreshers. They can easily be run remotely via a screen share on Teams or Zoom.
2. To use within teams, eg. in retros, as team activities to re-inforce the concepts, or just to let team members have a play and expore for themselves. Most devs will have a play with anything that involves github and npm...

Not Only, But Also...

Having outlined the benfits of these simulations, there is a further aspect that can be explored going forward. The fact that we can tweak various parameters means we can explore these simulations scientifically and start to do more in-depth research into the concepts. As an example, how does the distribution of coins in the Coin Game affect the results? This could inform us on how best to approach projects that are either high- or low-value heavy. What effect does the initial distribution of skills in the pairing game have on short-term progress? This could inform us about team composition when setting up a new team, depending on the length of the project. We thus have a research platform that allows us to answer many, many questions about team and project effectiveness based on the attributes of those teams and projects, and we can tailor the simulations to closely match an organisation's structures and explore them in a tailored and scientific way.

Get In touch

Do get in touch for more information, or to discuss further. There may also be collaboration opportunities going forward as we improve and add to the simulations.