on agile games and how to develop one

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On agile games and how to develop one

The journey of creating the Kanban Pizza Game


Games help to experience new concepts


Our journey to the Kanban Pizza Game

Franz Ivancsich Ralf Kruse


• Used games before and loved it ...

..., but never thought on develop one

• Game Design Model helped a lot[1]

• First try building one at Play4Agile failed ...

..., but got an idea how to build one

Design a game - My starting point: Play4Agile

[1] by Don McGreal & Michael McCullough


A while later ....we worked on our Kanban Training

• Points we wanted to improve:

• too much magic ... like questions for formulas to find initial WiP-Limits

• lack of understanding of the ownership off the board/system

• Kanban Games we know focus on a defined process/board

• ..., so that such games didn‘t help to understand

• ownership of the system

• Kanban starts where you are


We needed a deadline

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Back to the modelOur Learning Objectives for the game

• We talked about our Learning objectives, but never wrote them down.

• If we had they would look like the following

• experience the journey from an existing current process to a Kanban System

• Visualizing the workflow, Limit WiP, measure and optimize the flow

• pull principle

• ....


Iterating - The early versions

• First idea - Textual Support Scenario to a board

• textual scenario on paper as starting point

• creating a board based on the scenario taking a text about a support department

• simulate the work based on the board

• Our learnings

• Too close to actual work, prevents a playful learning experience

• Second idea - Pizza delivery process

• Same idea other scenario

• Our learnings

• process is too much defined

• gap between work and board design is too big

• still not playful enough


Here come the pizza pieces

• Integrating a pizza creation process based on paper in the game

• Thanks to google search for showing us a origami pizza piece :-)

• Our learnings

• We can skip the scenario in the game by defining constraints with the materials


Time for more Feedback (Did we feel ready ... No)

• Feedback helped a lot! Thanks to @oedel @alex235 @sven_kr @lasseziegler @scharlau for being our guinea pigs :-)

• Early playing is essential, otherwise there is a risk to overload the game

http://twitter.com/oedel

http://twitter.com/oedel

http://twitter.com/alex235

http://twitter.com/alex235

http://twitter.com/sven_kr

http://twitter.com/sven_kr

http://twitter.com/lasseziegler

http://twitter.com/lasseziegler

http://twitter.com/scharlau

http://twitter.com/scharlau

http://dict.leo.org/ende?lp=ende&p=DOKJAA&search=guinea&trestr=0x2001

http://dict.leo.org/ende?lp=ende&p=DOKJAA&search=guinea&trestr=0x2001

http://dict.leo.org/ende?lp=ende&p=DOKJAA&search=pig&trestr=0x2001

http://dict.leo.org/ende?lp=ende&p=DOKJAA&search=pig&trestr=0x2001


Tampere goes Agile: First public session


Kanban Pizza Gameby agile42 is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Germany License.

Further Informations:www.agile42.com/training/kanban-pizza-game

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/de/

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/de/

http://www.agile42.com/training/kanban-pizza-game

http://www.agile42.com/training/kanban-pizza-game


Summary on the Kanban Pizza Game

• A great game to start teaching Kanban

• Clear focus on creation of the Kanban System

• There are definitely other games with different learning objectives

(your choice of the game depends on what you want to learn)

• Great starting point for our trainings

• Played in lots of different places by us and others

• Game is shared under Creative Commons, you can use it too ;-)

• Lot‘s of ideas how to extend the game

• The game didn‘t stand alone and needs debriefing


Summary on Developing an Agile Game

• Model is a great thinking frame [1]

• Keep a clear focus on learning objectives

• Don‘t boil the ocean

• Some idea sounds nice in the first time

• Early Feedback is essential

• Distance of the game to actual work enables playful learning experience

[1] by Don McGreal & Michael McCullough


Developing great learning games needsfocus, conceptualization, creativity and early feedback

on agile games and how to develop one

Education

don mcgreal

learning objectives

michael mcculloughagile42

rights reserved

kanban

scenario

gameagile42

experience