Pre-game: Defining the Product
Setting the Stage: to explain the workshop participants the main learning objectives of the simulation, namely: “Why you’d want them to spend next hours playing with LEGO instead of speaking about Agile and Scrum?”.
- Setting the Stage: to explain the workshop participants the main learning objectives of the simulation, namely: “Why you’d want them to spend next hours playing with LEGO instead of seeing slides about Agile and Scrum?”.
- Pitching the Vision: to show an example of how a great Product Owner communicates the big picture and engages the teams for a meaningful product purpose. Walking Skeleton of the Simulation
- Forming the Teams: to teach how to form new teams to maximize learning and delivery. This is a huge learning opportunity if you’re to illustrate self-organization principles of Scrum and especially Large-Scale Scrum.
- User Story Mapping: to teach the structural way of capturing key product insights: users, user needs, possible solutions and release goals. Instead of the User Story Mapping feel free to choose any other structural backlog co-creation tool you want the participants to master.
- Refining the Product Backlog: to teach the emergent nature of the the product backlog and how much “just enough” details is what you need to get started.
- Estimating the Effort: to teach the fastest estimating technique(s) and the idea of relative complexity. Also can be used to teach Planning Poker and #NoEstimates.
- Re-Prioritizing the Work: to demonstrate how a great Product Owner facilitates getting ready for the first Sprint Planning with clear priorities that are coming from shared understanding of the upcoming work. And how those get changed during meaningful discussions with the teams.
In-game: Building the Product
- Planning a Sprint: to teach the concept of multi-team overall Sprint Planning as a technique for rich inter-team coordination.
- Building an Increment: to let’em finally play with LEGO for few minutes :)
- Reviewing the Increment: this is done altogether no matter how many people there are - this is to reveal the dysfunctions (e.g. late feature acceptance, delayed integration and so on) and the importance of keeping a tight cooperation between the Product Owner and the teams. Walking Skeleton of the Simulation
- Retrospecting the Process: to help create a positive habit of constant process improvements driven by the teams. Within the Large-Scale Scrum context this is a great placeholder to introduce the concept of an Overall Retrospective to teach the ideas of ‘optimizing the whole’ and ‘avoiding local optimizations’.
Post-game: Debrief
- Game Re-cap: a chance for a facilitator to help participants glue the parts of the game together and see a holistic process that drove to a holistic product.
- Lessons Learned: to amplify lessons learned and help participants see what helped them achieve the results despite of the inherent complexity of the problem (many people, unclear changing requirements, a messy process).
- Changing the World: to give participants a chance to reflect on how they can apply the same thinking and similar ideas to run their own product development initiatives.
Details of each step can be found in the lego4scrum book.