The Scrum Builders

How would you order the following teams?

This game helps participants explore key agile concepts including value, focus, slack, commitment, respect and openness and to explore the effects of a wider system on teams. During the game participants are invited to think about teams and outcomes from both the customer’s and a team member’s point of view. Using a metaphorical team of “Scrum Builders” rather than a software team helps tap into a deeper level of thinking with some extra psychological safety thrown in for free. I have found that game works well either with a group or an individual. I have played it with scrum teams, product owners, project managers, an entire project office, groups of managers and leaders to explore and open discussions around the relationships between value and trade-offs between environment and outcome. I have found this game works especially well when played with people who have a more traditional mindset or people who are more competitive.

If you are interested in playing this game with your team please drop me a line and I will post you a free pack of cards and facilitation notes.

Ask potential participants, would you like to play a game?

Then tell the story of the “Scrum builders”. You are doing some building work at your house and as you’re an agile kind of person you have found 6 building teams that use scrum to do building work. You have the details of the 6 building teams who can do a week’s work for a fixed price. You the customer pays for one week’s work to the team at the start of the week. You also have some feedback on the outcomes you should expect from each of the teams:

• Team Blueberry: Under Promise, Deliver and then stop and go home early
• Team Banana: Under Promise, Over Deliver what’s needed
• Team Kiwi: Over Promise, deliver what we promised but, in a rush, resulting in low quality/botched work.
• Team Apple: Under Promise and Over deliver including extra things we think are valuable
• Team Carrot: Promise Exactly and Deliver Exactly as Promised
• Team Cherry: Over Promise and Deliver some of it; the bits we can or prefer to do

Place all the cards on a desk face up so the participants can see details of each team and invite the participants to discuss the benefits of each team with aim of agreeing on who they would prefer to work on their house. Give the group approximately 5 mins to agree on. 

• The ranked ordered preference of the teams you would like to work on your property and why
• The unicorn/fake team that doesn’t really exist

If the participants get stuck, you may want to ask some open questions to move things forwards

• How would you rank the building teams from most preferred to least preferred?
• Why do you think this team is preferable to that team (go through every team and ask why)?
• Do all the teams exist, i.e. are any of the team outcomes impossible?

The Unicorn or Fake Team

Team carrot is the fake team, explore which team carrot is pretending to be and what behaviour they are really displaying

• Which other team is team carrot pretending to be to achieve this outcome? (Team Blueberry with thumb twiddling?)
• How realistic is it to expect a deliver to an estimate exactly (to the exact second)?

Closing Questions

In different environments could all the team behaviours you see on the cards be a logical tactic? Ask questions to explore further:

• Why did you rank each team in each position?
• What conditions or environment would cause each team to be most preferred? (Point at and ask each card in sequence)
• What would you change (in the rankings) if we were thinking about the longer term?
• Which team would you enjoy working in, and what effect would that have over the longer term?
• How does trust fit in?
• Which teams have you worked with or in?
• What are the effects of the wider organisation on teams?
• How can we act differently to get different outcomes?
• What outcomes are we optimising for?
• Has anything surprised you about this game?
• What learnings can we take away?

Good luck playing, I would love to hear how you get on, and what insights you and you're team get from playing this game.

I have put this game on laminated cards along with facilitation instructions. If you are interested in receiving a free game pack please drop me a message and I will endeavor to send you a pack.