CYF PD

Learning Objectives

Describe 3 methods to increase the value of work

Introduction

Almost all professional development involves people with different skills working together to deliver the things their customers want: designers, developers, testers, and so on. How they manage their work together impacts how quickly and effectively they deliver. This exercise explores the importance of ideas like prioritising your backlog, limiting the number of tasks that the team – or parts of a team – does, and reassigning people to work on different types of work to improve workflow.

Notes: Work-in-progress, or WIP, refers to the amount of work in a process that has been started but not completely delivered. This can include both tasks that are actively being worked on, as well as tasks that are waiting in a queue somewhere for the next person to pick up.

Exercises

Agile Game (50 minutes)

Goal: Manage a simulated team to deliver as much value as possible to your customer in 4 sprints of 10 working days each.

Go to https://agilegame.octigo.pl/main and read the rules of the simulation.
When ready to start, click on 2. Play Simulation.

Remember that you can pause the game by toggling the Stop control. This is useful when you want to re-prioritize your backlog, move tasks between different subteams, or move team members between different subteams.

You can also use the Speed control to slow down or speed up the simulation.
After 40 simulated days, view your scores. What was the value of the work your team delivered? Consider these questions:
- In what ways did you notice limiting the amount of work-in-progress impact the effectiveness of the subteams?
- How did you prioritize the work your team started on?
- Did you move people between subteams to help when one subteam was overloaded and if so, why did this help?
Do you think you could improve your score? If you want to, you can click 4. Play again to try and improve your results
Post one thing you found most challenging and one thing that was the most fun on your cohort’s CYF Slack channel.

Many development teams adopt this saying:

“Stop starting and start finishing!”

Assign teams for Design-A-Snack game (10 minutes)

Goal: Assign people to teams for the Design-A-Snack game

Only ONE person needs to do this prep. Assign people in your cohort into smaller teams of 3-5 people each. If nobody else has announced they are going to do this, send a message on your Slack channel saying you will do it. They will surely treat you as the hero that you are and buy you doughnuts.
Copy this template spreadsheet and fill in the names of you and your colleagues to create an even number of teams of 3-5 people each. Decide who will be the facilitator who will tell people when to move on to the next part of the game.
Post the spreadsheet on your Slack channel so everyone knows which team they are in.