Timing:

1 Hr.

Ingredients:

• Teams: 1 or more of 5 to 6 people
• Color paper: 4 different colors (20 pages or each color per team)
• Glue sticks: 2 per team
• Scissors: 2 pairs per team
• Envelopes: 2 different sizes or colors (20 of each per team)
• Color pencils: 1 set per team
• Masking tape: 1 per team
• Post-its: 3 different colors per team
• Misc stickers (optional)

Recipe:

This is a game to understand some of the mechanics of Kanban such as balancing the work-in-progress, resource allocation, and waste management. Each team has to create its own Kanban board as they see fit and improve it as the game develops.

The objective is to create paper pamphlets to promote a vacation resort. Each pamphlet will have some drawn and some pasted artwork in addition to written information.Note: each paper and envelope has to pass through the entire production line and each person can do only one thing at a time (e.g. a person cannot be writing on a pamphlet and passing envelopes at the same time). One story per pamphlet, meaning it has to be broken into smaller tasks (think epic=pamphlet).

1. Each team will have:
   • Paper: 3 different colors (you keep the 4^th color paper for later)
   • 1 glue-stick (you keep the other one for later)
   • 1 pair of scissors (you keep the other one for later)
   • 1 kind of envelope (you keep the other one for later)
   • Color pencils
   • Stickers (optional)
   • Duct tape
2. Explain the roles and responsibilities:
1. Header: writes company name and campaign name
2. Cutter: cuts the artwork (sun, palm tree, flying bird, boat)
3. Artist: draws the ocean line, the beach, and pastes the papercuts
4. QA guy: verifies all is correct (all pamphlets must be similar)
5. Folder/sender: folds pamphlet, puts it in envelope, writes customer name/address and puts on a stack for sending.
6. Manager: manages the kanban board
3. Before starting:
• Make sure all teams have their material available and roles assigned.
4. Explain the game:
• They must create pamphlets, one at a time
• Pamphlet, envelope, and paper cuts must be of different colors
• All pamphlets must look the same
• All envelopes and paper must start at the beginning of the production line
• Nobody can do more than 1 thing at a time. (e.g. either I pass a sheet of paper to the next person or draw the beach but cannot be drawing and passing papers at the same time)
• They must have periodic stand up meetings to improve the process.
5. The game:
1. Give them 5 minutes to define and create their Kanban board on a wall
2. Give them 2 minutes to get set
3. Start!
4. Each 6 minutes stop them so that each team has its own 2-minute stand-up meeting
5. For iteration 3 ask the managers to expedite the creation of 2 pamphlets of different color with different artwork (palm tree, 2 boats and one diamond-shaped kite)
6. For iteration 4 change ask managers to use the other kind/color of envelope.
7. For iteration 6 change team sizes (merging 2 into one or breaking one team to integrate into other 2. This is even better if the teams end up being of different sizes)
8. Let them play for 2 more iterations
6. Post-game discussion

Learning Points:

• Collaboration is key to success
• Some aspects that require changes on WIP are very obvious while others are subtle
• Roles and responsibilities continuously change (titles lose importance)
• Response to variability is highly effective
• Lack of iterations make the work smooth and efficient
• Regular discussions to improve process are key
• It scales because daily stand up duration does not depend on the # of people in the team

This post was submitted by Masa K Maeda.

45-60 mins

Ingredients:

• Pens & paper for all
• Business team, with shared domain responsibility. For example, the HR department or  Sales team. You can have a mixture so long as there is overlap.

Recipe:

• Explain some basic workflow/process mapping mechanics and identify the Value Stream.
• Have each person (or groups of two or three depending on size of the audience) map the Value Stream identified above. Give 15-20 minutes to this activity and encourage discussion.
• Once completed, post each Value Stream Map on the wall and have all participants compare and contrast their results. There will almost certainly be differences.
• Then discuss the challenges with optimizing the business process to eliminate Waste (Muda) and improve  Flow(Mura) when there is not a clear and consistent picture of the business process itself. Look for examples in the different maps provided that would lead to inefficient or potentially harmful improvements that might be attempted.

Other helpful hints:

If the maps provided are relatively consistent then the discussion is not warranted and a congratulation on the maturity of the group is all that is needed and you can move on to improving flow, eliminating waste  and mapping future state.

Learning Points:

• It is not unusual for the people in an operational business unit to have very divergent perspectives of how the operation actually runs. It is particularly pronounced between management and frontline workers.
• A valid and real perspective of the Process Map is absolutely critical before beginning any discussion about how to improve it.

Posted by Mike McCullough

Credit:

Ingredients:

• 100+ Toothpicks (or something similar)
• At least one Die

Directions:

Participants line up in a row with a collection of toothpicks (or something similar) placed with the first participant. The first participant rolls a die to determine how many toothpicks to pass to the next participant. Each participant then takes turns rolling the die and passing the corresponding amount of toothpicks to the next player. The final player creates a stack of toothpicks based on his/her roll and then passes the die back to the first participant to continue with the next round. Play until it is obvious where the stacks are forming.

Learning Points:

• Even though all participants have the same odds, inventory still piles up. Tie this in to Value Streams and software.
• In software, requirements are your inventory. It is wasteful to process them all up front.

CREDIT: The Goal, Dr. Eliyahu M. Goldratt, 1984

Posted by Mike

Ingredients:

• At least 10 pages (8.5’ X 11’) per participant
• 1 marker per participant
• Stickers

Directions:

We are having a party, and we need to enlist everybody in the room to create invitation cards (3 per person). Begin by showing an example of what the finished card should look like:

1. fold page in half
2. draw a happy face on the front,
3. write a message on the inside,
4. sign the card,
5. stamp the back (sticker) and,
6. mail the card by dropping it in a box.

Once everybody is comfortable with all of the steps, start the timer and have participants build 3 cards each by completing each step to completion before moving on to the next step; this is known as batch & queue. Stop production about half way through and ask everybody what would happen if we decided to change the color of the paper. How much wasted effort would there be? How does this map to software? Let production continue and note the time when the first card is delivered to the customer and again when all cards are complete. Run the process again. This time, have participants complete a card before moving on to the next; this is known as single piece flow. Again, stop production about half way through and ask the same questions as before. Let production continue and compare the times with the first method. Obviously, the second method is much faster at getting something to the customer, but more surprisingly, the second method is also faster over all. Discuss why this is; if the participants say that it is because they have become more efficient, then run it again with the first method and challenge them to beat their time.

Learning Points:

• By taking a smaller set of requirements all the way to completion, you get something to the customer faster. Conversely, if all the requirements are processed at the same time, changes later in the cycle become more costly.
• Single piece flow is often faster then batch and queue. This is due to the fact that each cross-functional participant can take ownership of a module all the way to completion, reducing overall task-switching and hand-offs.

Posted by Mike

Timing 60 mins

To see some photos of this game being players, check out these from the Edmonton Agile Users Group:http://flickr.com/photos/agileedmonton/sets/72157608361951089/

Ingredients

Per team of 4-6

• Two big stacks of blue and yellow paper (8.5’ X 11’)
• Two glue sticks per team
• Two to Three pairs of scissors per team
• Roll of tape

Directions

We are in the business of making paper faces. The face is composed of;

• a blue oval face (cut from 1/4 of the page)
• yellow eyes either two triangles or two rectangles
• a yellow mouth, either a triangle or rectangle

We have four models;

• The Mike – triangle eyes triangle mouth
• The Don – rectangle eyes,rectangle mouth
• The Aleem – triangle eyes, rectangle mouth
• The Jessica – rectangle eyes, triangle mouth

First Run – Push Process

Decide up front what the market will buy of the above models, write these down but do no share with participants. The team will make a best guess of what the market will buy and they set up an assembly line:

1. a face is cut from the blue paper
2. draw a face representing one of the models above (this is the requirement)
3. The appropriate eyes are affixed
4. The appropriate mouth is affixed
5. The face is taped to the wall (delivered to market)

Have each team build at least one face to ensure they understand what they are doing before starting the clock. Let them run for 4-5 minutes. After the time is up, unveil the actual orders from the market and have the teams calculate their Net based on the following:

• Every face they sold = $400
• Every unsold completed face = <$200>
• Every unsold eye = <$25>
• Every unsold mouth = <$50>
• Every uncompleted face = <$100>

Some will make a little money, most will be deep in the red and some will have broken even. Discuss the business model and what happens to a business that produces product and inventory that its on a shelf.

Second Run – Pull Process

This time the team will work within a system that only builds product when orders come in from the market Have each team set up the following assembly line with the Queues described below.

1. RFQ- Readied Face Queue: Two uncompleted face with eyes attached only. One with rectangle eyes, the other with triangle eyes
2. MQ- Mouth Queue: Two mouths, one rectangular, the other triangular
3. FQ -Face Queue: One blank face
4. EQ- Eye Queue(I love puns too!):Two sets of eyes, one rectangular, the other triangular

This time each team will wait until you call out a model to build. So for instance if you call for a mike, the person in front of the RFQ, pulls a triangular mouth from the MQ and deliver the product to the customer. This sends signals to replenish the RFQ and MQ. The result of replenishing these queues sends signals to FQ and EQ to be replenished. Have each team build one model and replenish Queues before beginning.

For about 4-5 minutes again, call out orders for models that customer have ordered. Mike, Aleem, Don, Mike, Jessica…………. Don’t call them out too fast since the inventory they are maintaining will not support multiple orders at once. Just watch the teams to get a sense of the pace they can handle. We sometimes ramp up the pace near the end to illustrate the point of keeping you inventory levels as low as possible but high enough to meet market demand as these need to be balanced.

At the end of 2 minutes all teams are typically ahead of the best result from the previous round and we will point this out when that milestone has passed. At the end of 4-5 minutes do the same accounting exercise as last time. Every team will have made money

Learning Points

• The efficiency of Lean Pull processes
• The economic problem with presuming to predict the market and not planning short releases.
• Kanban – to introduce this, have the teams draw out the shapes that go into their queues. These are your Kanban signs.
• The importance of cash flow and receiving a return on investment

Posted by Mike