Giving and receiving feedback are essential skills for both Agile managers and practitioners. The Perfection Game, part of the Core Protocols, provides a painless framework for having difficult conversations. Come play the Perfection Game to practice this skill and get feedback from other players who will also use the Perfection Game.

Software engineers get feedback from their development environment and automated test suites in real-time. Errors can be fixed and verified in minutes. However, when organizations extend Agile beyond technology, feedback from stakeholders takes days and the “feedback frenzies” can drag on for weeks or even months. Completing a story within a sprint seems impossible. It is time for “the business” to dramatically reduce lead time and stop getting blamed for delays.

This workshop will teach you how to run a value stream mapping activity. This immersive group activity will expose needless delays and help find ways to to shorten cycle time to minutes, reducing overall lead time by 80% or more. It will include a way to overlay feedback loops on the value stream map, which can help you find the source of significant delays.

You will also hear how creative teams are adapting mob programming techniques into their work in ways that build feedback into their processes in order to accelerate delivery from business teams.

MIT is home to one of the world's oldest and largest scavenger hunts, the MIT Mystery Hunt. To honor this tradition, I propose running an Agile Scavenger Hunt - a team event where the clues, activities, and strategies related to Agile Principles.

The rules of the game are setup to encourage showing examples of Agile in action - delivery early and often, prioritize by Cost of Delay, face-to-face communications, collaboration, determine value to the customer, etc. We ran this event in Barcelona for a global team formation event - rules & clues attached. We would customize them for Cambridge/Boston.

TBC

Sharon Bowman's Training From the Back of the Room brings games to teaching and training. This provides an immersive, hands-on learning experience. One of her key messages is "Do the thing to learn the thing." We have created an introductory class on the underlying principles of Agile. This class follows Sharon's 4C (Connection, Concept, Concrete Practice, and Close) map. We will present this class with a focus on the games that utilize Sharon Bowman's principles and reflect on how this class was constructed.