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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.

This book is written for:

• Scrum Trainers exploring way of adding more elements of interactivity and gaming into the trainings turning them more to “from the back of the room” kind of things.
• Agile Coaches looking for new training and coaching ideas with some elements of serious plays and simulations.
• Scrum Masters willing to get ideas how to introduce agile thinking to new teams and newcomers in a fun and easy way.
• Professors and Teachers trying to adapt their teaching style to the ever-changing world that is full of games, fun and LEGO.
• Anyone else who is in charge of "installing Agile thinking and Scrum in a workspace".

lego4scrum 3.0 incorporates the following popular agile coaching techniques:

• user story mapping
• magic estimates
• overall backlog refinement with multiple teams
• joint multi-team scrum meetings
• continuous integration and deployment
• and more little tips and tricks to make the simulation valuable and fun.

The book lego4scrum 3.0 has chapter on a scaled version of the game. The known record is 155 people playing in 22 teams!

So here are the additional instructions for the facilitators:

So many people keep asking things like:

Which LEGO sets do I buy?

How many boxes and bricks required for n people?

How to set up the room and make sure all is set for the workshop?

That I've decided to share the book's chapter dedicated to these and other preparatory topics.

Hope this helps. And if does, feel free to get the whole book (100 pages):

• https://leanpub.com/lego4scrum
• https://amzn.to/2UUQ5R0

The simulation is scalable. The limit is your imagination.

See a new article on using #lego4scrum for simulating LeSS Huge Framework .

Author: Alexey Krivitsky

Recently I had a chance to run lego4scrum for ... 155 people. And it was fun!

The simulation started with explaining the ideas of the LeSS and LeSS Huge frameworks.

Then we run a team self-design workshop where all participants create 22 teams based on their skills and some other constraints.

Six product managers played a Product Owner team with a Chief Product Owner in charge of the overall product visioning and alignment.

This was a Lego Enterprise with a mission of providing long-distance sightseeing trips to city citizens. The enterprise received its initial funding and was expected to get profitable as soon as possible.

Based on presented market needs (users were willing to travel and pay for certain destinations) the Product was split into six Requirements Areas (one for each of the cities) each with an Area Product Owner and 3-6 teams to work on a specific city with its infrastructure.

Then all Requirement Area groups had a simultaneous Initial Product Backlog Refinement session for about 15 minutes defining product elements to get built. This process was facilitated by a pair of ScrumMasters serving each group.

Surprisingly a community of practice emerged during these discussions - representatives of different groups started to design a transportation hub with a goal to minimize the needed material (the materials had to be bought and were expensive).

Then a multi-team Sprint Planning for 22 teams all in our room. Just 3 minutes. All teams created their Sprint Backlog and also a visual Sprint Board to visualize sprint progress...

The Enterprise nearly broke after the 1st sprint - too much material spent on cities (Lego bricks had its price) and very little buses and roads to actually help making money (Oops!).

After a series of retrospectives: one per a Requirement Area and then an Overall one, the Enterprise agreed on its key improvements.

Surprisingly, the market changed too. Right after "Brexit" everyone was willing to leave London, and also due to the Christmas time Prague became the number-one destination. This came to a big surprise to the teams and the Product Onwers since Prague was not in a list of the six initial cities... Inspect and adapt!

The 2nd sprint demonstrated the whole power of self-organization and unleashed creativity. The teams were able to demonstrate 6 cities interconnected with transportation lines cruising passengers and they made good profit!

Wesley van Heije has just submitted an experience report on teach Scrum with LEGO.

Check it out: Teaching Agile through Games

Image by Hakan Forss

Hey LEGO Lovers,

The LEGO Set referred to in the facilitator's guide is no longer available in stores.

So here are few ideas for its replacement.

Filmed and shared by Jan Kees Velthoven

Written by David Cartagena,
Project Manager at mhs.com 

We have been working hard to increase adoption of scrum to multiple teams as we’ve had some great success with one project while others have had difficulties getting off the ground.

I took it upon myself to investigate opportunities on how to increase collaboration and understanding of the scrum process with my teams as they worked on multiple projects that were driving towards one collective goal.

Then I found Lego Scrum!

The basis of the session was to build my city, I also took the opportunity to start introducing some of our project managers as scrum masters within the exercise.

We had participation of 18 people from multiple departments: UX, Research, QA, Marketing, Programming, Project Managers, IT and 2 interns! It was great involvement for the first attempt to run a scrum training session within the company.

Posted by Alexey Krivitsky