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:

• People and space
• 1 stop watch
• Optionally, something to record the audio with.

Directions:

Have the team sit/stand in a circle. You want to get a story of the last sprint that is told by the entire team. You start by saying ‘Once upon a time , we had a X (insert sprint length here!) week sprint…’. Then, the next person to your left adds to your sentence and this carries on until the last person has spoken or if the story is developing in an interesting direction, until all the points appear to have been made and there is nothing of value coming through. You might want to strictly enforce the time limit for a large team.

After the retrospective , you could run the game again to tell the story of the next sprint, and this should galvanise the improvements that will take place and nicely summarise the lessons learnt and help the team visualise how the next sprint could be better. This game helps to create an ongoing shared goal and represents an oral history of the software process.

Learning Points:

• Discover a consensus view of the success/failures from the last sprint.
• Empower everyone to add value to a collective goal through participation.
• Exercise the ‘responding to change’ learning point from the word-at-a-time letter game.

CREDIT: Mike Sutton

Posted by Mike

Ingredients:

• Whiteboards and/or flip-charts
• Markers

Directions:

Divide the participants in to groups and ask them to graphically represent their current development process. Have them think about roles, artifacts produced, and challenges. Invite them to be creative and to not worry about using any formal notation (UML, Gantt Charts, RUP, etc.). Ask them not to use people’s names, or to criticize personalities.

Each team will then then present their creation to the whole group.

Learning Points:

• This is an interesting and fun way for a facilitator to gain visibility in to what is working and what the challenges are in an organization’s current process.

• This exercise also creates more transparency within a team, by giving people a chance to see how others characterize the process.

Posted by Mike