This document outlines a process for prioritizing a project portfolio using online games called Innovation Games. It involves gathering all potential projects, removing obvious non-starters, splitting projects into "run the business" and new projects. Projects are prepared for prioritization games. Games are used to prioritize the projects and confirm resource requirements match priorities. Case studies from Cisco, HP, and VeriSign show benefits include engaging global teams, reducing risk, and having fun.
Lean principles and practices have long been applied to manufacturing, with Agile arguably the inevitable evolution of Lean applied to knowledge-based work.
When viewed from a customer’s perspective much of software development may be seen as lower value. How can organizations become lean by eliminating waste and working smarter?
This presentation explores Lean principles and practices applied to software beginning with value stream mapping and the 7 (+1) types of waste.
Presented as an Agile 101 session at Agile New England on 5 August 2021.
This workshop is divided in two parts:
1 - Why? What? So? - Just to make sure everyone knows what they want
to try. 2- LegoForScrum 3.0 - Interactive Scrum Framework Simulation
*For personal use only. Please Check Read Me.
Spiking Your Way to Improved Agile Development - Anatoli KazatchkovAtlassian
New feature development in agile should almost always start with a spike. Spikes help to define feature scope, uncover technical unknowns, and provide accurate estimates. In this session we will cover how to introduce spikes into your development cycles and show how Atlassian defines spike goals, focuses spike efforts, and makes feature development more effective.
Lean principles and practices have long been applied to manufacturing, with Agile arguably the inevitable evolution of Lean applied to knowledge-based work.
When viewed from a customer’s perspective much of software development may be seen as lower value. How can organizations become lean by eliminating waste and working smarter?
This presentation explores Lean principles and practices applied to software beginning with value stream mapping and the 7 (+1) types of waste.
Presented as an Agile 101 session at Agile New England on 5 August 2021.
This workshop is divided in two parts:
1 - Why? What? So? - Just to make sure everyone knows what they want
to try. 2- LegoForScrum 3.0 - Interactive Scrum Framework Simulation
*For personal use only. Please Check Read Me.
Spiking Your Way to Improved Agile Development - Anatoli KazatchkovAtlassian
New feature development in agile should almost always start with a spike. Spikes help to define feature scope, uncover technical unknowns, and provide accurate estimates. In this session we will cover how to introduce spikes into your development cycles and show how Atlassian defines spike goals, focuses spike efforts, and makes feature development more effective.
An overview of the Agile Manifesto and the principles and practices that define Agile software development. A comparison of Agile Development methodologies and an organisational culture that supports them
Kanban explained - both for manufacturing processes as well as non-manufacturing: service, project management, etc. Kanban really isn't as complicated of a concept as people make it out to be. It's pretty much all one model applied in different ways.
This presentation has some theory, some examples, and some advice & quotes related to the tool
A small presentation by Ashley-Christian Hardy on the basics of Scrum methodology, covering the basics of roles & responsibilities, events & ceremonies and scrum artefacts.
When I needed to do presentations of Scrum to executives and students, I started to look for existing ones. Most presentations I found were very good for detailed presentations or training. But what I was looking for was a presentation I could give in less than 15 minutes (or more if I wanted). Most of them also contained out dated content. For example, the latest changes in the Scrum framework were not present and what has been removed was still there.
Dealing with Difficult Stakeholders: Tips for Product PeopleRoman Pichler
Leading stakeholders and development teams is notoriously challenging for product people: They lack the power to tell the individuals what to do, but need their support to progress the product. To make things worse, stakeholders come from different departments and often have different perspectives and interests, which leads to disagreements and conflicts. This talk shares my tips for dealing with difficult stakeholders, constructively resolving conflict, and creating value together.
Prioritization is the most important task product managers do. This presentation looks at different frameworks for prioritization, steps back to examine how products create value, and then offers practical tips to prioritize well.
From Product Strategy to Backlog: Best Practices for Integrating Aha! Roadmap...Cprime
More than 5,000 companies choose Aha! Roadmaps for setting brilliant strategy, prioritizing features, and sharing visual plans. Product teams rely on robust integrations with leading development tools like Jira. They use these to share prioritized work with engineering and track progress against their roadmap in real-time.
Aha! expert Shawn Zenz and Cprime product coach Chris Poole will discuss product management best practices and demonstrate the most effective integration configurations.
You will learn how to:
- Set product strategy, plan releases, and prioritize features in Aha! Roadmaps
- Send features to your development team in Jira for implementation
- Monitor progress and track value creation
Download the associated webinar here: https://www.cprime.com/resource/webinars/from-product-strategy-to-backlog-best-practices-for-integrating-aha-roadmaps-with-jira/
Agile Scrum Training (+ Kanban), Day 2 (2/2)Jens Wilke
Training materials for Agile Scrum. This presentation goes into more detail how to manage you product backlog, bug inflow and resolution and technical debt. Benefits of test driven development and continuous integration and live deployment are also discussed. Kanban is introduced in more detail, and the benefits of Scrum, Kanban and Scrum-Ban are compared.
This presentation covers tips and tricks for game developers and covers a little bit of everything for both work for hire developers, as well as those creating their own IP.
An overview of the Agile Manifesto and the principles and practices that define Agile software development. A comparison of Agile Development methodologies and an organisational culture that supports them
Kanban explained - both for manufacturing processes as well as non-manufacturing: service, project management, etc. Kanban really isn't as complicated of a concept as people make it out to be. It's pretty much all one model applied in different ways.
This presentation has some theory, some examples, and some advice & quotes related to the tool
A small presentation by Ashley-Christian Hardy on the basics of Scrum methodology, covering the basics of roles & responsibilities, events & ceremonies and scrum artefacts.
When I needed to do presentations of Scrum to executives and students, I started to look for existing ones. Most presentations I found were very good for detailed presentations or training. But what I was looking for was a presentation I could give in less than 15 minutes (or more if I wanted). Most of them also contained out dated content. For example, the latest changes in the Scrum framework were not present and what has been removed was still there.
Dealing with Difficult Stakeholders: Tips for Product PeopleRoman Pichler
Leading stakeholders and development teams is notoriously challenging for product people: They lack the power to tell the individuals what to do, but need their support to progress the product. To make things worse, stakeholders come from different departments and often have different perspectives and interests, which leads to disagreements and conflicts. This talk shares my tips for dealing with difficult stakeholders, constructively resolving conflict, and creating value together.
Prioritization is the most important task product managers do. This presentation looks at different frameworks for prioritization, steps back to examine how products create value, and then offers practical tips to prioritize well.
From Product Strategy to Backlog: Best Practices for Integrating Aha! Roadmap...Cprime
More than 5,000 companies choose Aha! Roadmaps for setting brilliant strategy, prioritizing features, and sharing visual plans. Product teams rely on robust integrations with leading development tools like Jira. They use these to share prioritized work with engineering and track progress against their roadmap in real-time.
Aha! expert Shawn Zenz and Cprime product coach Chris Poole will discuss product management best practices and demonstrate the most effective integration configurations.
You will learn how to:
- Set product strategy, plan releases, and prioritize features in Aha! Roadmaps
- Send features to your development team in Jira for implementation
- Monitor progress and track value creation
Download the associated webinar here: https://www.cprime.com/resource/webinars/from-product-strategy-to-backlog-best-practices-for-integrating-aha-roadmaps-with-jira/
Agile Scrum Training (+ Kanban), Day 2 (2/2)Jens Wilke
Training materials for Agile Scrum. This presentation goes into more detail how to manage you product backlog, bug inflow and resolution and technical debt. Benefits of test driven development and continuous integration and live deployment are also discussed. Kanban is introduced in more detail, and the benefits of Scrum, Kanban and Scrum-Ban are compared.
This presentation covers tips and tricks for game developers and covers a little bit of everything for both work for hire developers, as well as those creating their own IP.
Kickstart your Product Backlog with Innovation GamesFrederic Vandaele
How to start your Scrum project? How to initialize your product backlog? You are not alone, in most agile projects, managing the product backlog remains a complex and difficult activity.
Scrum said that it's the Product Owner that manage the product backlog but it does not tell us how (It's a framework you know). However, the product owners are people from the business. They have little or no experience with Agile and what it means in term of contribution to the project.
How to involve a group of users in the creation of product backlog without that they feel cheated or ignored? How to prioritize dozens or even hundreds of user stories of varying sizes with a group of users representing different needs with conflicting interests?
The Innovation Games are techniques that can address these issues. The art is to combine these methods with a view to a common vision to emerge as an initial product backlog that will help the Scrum team to start the project on a solid foundation.
Presented at Agile Tour Brussels 2013
Joshua Letourneau of LG & Associates presents a gameplan for establishing a Strategic Sourcing Framework at your organization. As always, the endgame is hiring more great-fit talent in less time for less cost than your competition, not to mention retaining them longer while achieving peak engagement.
Why Big and Small Data Is Important by Google's Product ManagerProduct School
In this talk, Dan McClary, a Product Manager at Google, walked through the importance of using data to drive product decisions, as well as how to quickly pull together an architecture using free tools to help grow a product effort from market analysis to live data capture and data-driven product decisions. We also played a rousing game of Breakout.
Wonderful Investment Opportunity Pitch Deck for a company providing solutions to two needs in two huge industries. The two industries are gaming and advertising.
Essential Guide to game content development for those who think they have a great game idea, but don't know what to begin with.
The Guide covers:
pre-production - idea development, plot overview, how to staff your game development team and schedule game production,
production - game development stages, insights from real-life game development cases
Similar to How To Prioritize a Portfolio Using Innovation Games (20)
A visible architecture is a physical model of a software system created by architecture teams using Duplo® bricks, with strings representing data flows. Visible architectures enable teams to collaboratively understand the “as-is” architecture and make better choices on the “to-be” architecture. We use Visible Architectures and frameworks like Speed Boat and Prune the Product Tree to help teams succeed. This deck outlines a step-by-step process for how to create a visible architecture.
The agile values and practices we all hold dear give us more than the ability to tackle problems associated with software development. They give us the ability to tackle Awesome Superproblems. These are problems that are bigger than what one person can solve alone and get worse through inaction. They require collaboration and foundation for action, even when the actions cannot be proven correct when they are enacted.
Despite their enormous challenge, when we make progress on solving Awesome Superproblems we find that new patterns that can be applied to solve classes of similar problems.
In this presentation, usually given as a conference keynote, I show the collaborative, social, and serious games that have their roots in the Agile Community have blossomed into multidimensional frameworks that are being used by agilists around the world to solve awesome superproblems. Without any special superpowers except a willingness to try.
The Post Agile World of Framework-Driven CollaborationLuke Hohmann
I hope you enjoy my keynote from the Agile Warrior Conference on 31-Jan-2018. In this keynote I presented the future of increasing performance in the Agile community through the use of Collaborative Frameworks such as Innovation Games®.
Agile New Zealand Keynote: Agile Being vs. Doing AgileLuke Hohmann
This is the slide deck from my Agile New Zealand 2017 keynote.
The Agile Community loves to talk about 'leadership' and how better 'leaders' can bring project success. And most of the popular Agile methods love to frame 'leadership' as the essential ingredient of success. Unfortunately, too many teams spend too much time discussing these topics without fully appreciating their deeper meanings. In this keynote you'll be able to explore what this means for you and your team - and you might find yourself ditching "leader" and "manager" in favor of "agilist".
This deck provides an overview of the Conteneo Weave platform. It explains the core underlying concepts and such things as guest lists, forums, galas and basic operations within the system.
This slide deck provides a detailed overview on how to use the Conteneo Weave Idea Engine to create, facilitate and post-process visual collaboration frameworks like Speed Boat, Cover Story, Prune the Product Tree, Gamestorming frameworks like Empathy Map, Canvases like the Business Model Canvas and even custom frameworks.
This slide deck provides a detailed overview on how to use the Conteneo Weave Decision Engine to collaboratively prioritize product features with customers, project portfolios with internal teams, allocate resources and engage citizens through Participatory Budgeting and Budget Games.
This slide deck provides an overview of several advanced features in Weave, including anonymous play, prioritizing large lists and developing custom frameworks for large teams.
2017 San Jose, CA Zero-Based Budgeting ResultsLuke Hohmann
On 28-Jan-2017, San José, CA implemented another round of Citywide Participatory Budgeting. This implementation used a Zero-Based Budgeting format based on the Innovation Game® Buy a Feature along with soliciting fresh ideas on how to improve neighborhoods using the Innovation Game® Prune the Product Tree. Every Voice Engaged Foundation produced the event which was superbly facilitated by dozens of pro-bono facilitators.
Cisco has created a powerful and compelling Human-Centered Design process with dozens of useful frameworks (like Empathy Map, Rose-Bud-Thorn, Difficulty-Importance and so forth).
The challenge was that Cisco needed these frameworks to scale so that globally distributed teams could use common frameworks at scale. Cisco partnered with Conteneo for the solution - described in this deck.
How to Prioritize Grants in a Corporate Social Responsibility ProgramLuke Hohmann
When working with a large customer on prioritizing their product development portfolio we found that their Corporate Social Responsibility team was also facing a significant challenges in getting their employees engaged in selecting potential program grants. This deck shows how you can easily adapt the Innovation Game Buy a Feature, powered via the online collaboration engine Decision Engine, to engage ALL of your employees in selecting projects for funding in your CSR portfolio.
Scrum Alliance Collaboration at Scale Webinar: Agile RoadmappingLuke Hohmann
Our 2016-Sep Collaboration at Scale Webinar focused on Agile Roadmapping. In this deck you'll find motivations and reasons for why a team should roadmap, an exploration of typical roadmap failures, how to fit roadmapping into Scrum, the best known format and structure for Market-Driven Agile Roadmapping from my book "Beyond Software Architecture" and an overview of how to create a roadmap using online and in-person collaboration frameworks.
This presentation presents a simple and direct model for Agile Portfolio Management based on four key concepts:
1. The type of work you're doing.
2. The portfolio governance model.
3. The project governance model (the shape of the project).
4. The size / number of Agile teams.
The deck presents simple, scalable, effective approaches to Agile Portfolio Management that are lighter than most Agile methods and are supported by Conteneo's Collaboration Frameworks. This deck also directly supports Conteneo's Strategy-Glue-Tactics framework for effective Agile Product Management.
CXPA 2016 Keynote: Designing for Collaboration and DeliberationLuke Hohmann
In this 2016 CXPA (www.cxpa.org) keynote, Conteneo founder and CEO Luke Hohmann explores the many factors that distinguish designing for collaboration and deliberation from designing for communication, coordination or other forms of solo tasks. Sadly, SlideShare doesn't enable you to experience the interactive frameworks Luke used to illustrate these points - but you can see these at the end of the presentation.
This is a deck prepared for Every Voice Engaged Foundation Facilitators and Conteneo Certified Collaboration Architects to teach them how to implement the allocation of funds in Participatory Budgeting programs using the Budget Allocator version of the Conteneo Decision Engine.
IIBA Columbus 2015 Keynote by Luke HohmannLuke Hohmann
Here is a copy of the highly interactive keynote I gave at the IIBA Columbus meeting. The keynote was VERY light on slides and VERY HEAVY on collaborative gaming. We played a number of games to illustrate how amazing products and services are created through games like Cover Story, Product Box, Spider Web and Buy A Feature.
In 2010 the Scrum Alliance hired Conteneo (then called "The Innovation Games Company") to produce a series of online games using the Conteneo Ideas to Action framework. We engaged 35 CSTs through Prune the Product Tree. After analyzing the results we identified 14 projects and then used Buy a Feature to engage a larger community in prioritizing these projects. The Scrum Alliance successfully implemented many of these projects, demonstrating that the Scrum Alliance is truly acting in a manner congruent with core Agile values.
Using Product Box to Build the Complete DeveloperLuke Hohmann
In 2006 I was asked to give the keynote at the Better Software Conference on "The Complete Developer". It was a perfect opportunity to use the Innovation Game® Product Box to with senior leaders of Silicon Valley Companies like Google and EMC to identify the three core sets of attributes that they consider most valuable in a developer: technical competence, customer driven and business acumen.
A Pattern Language for Strategic Product RoadmappingLuke Hohmann
Here is the pattern language for developing a market driven product roadmap from my book "Beyond Software Architecture". You can use this format in conjunction with the Innovation Game® Prune the Product Tree to create great Product Roadmaps.
JMeter webinar - integration with InfluxDB and GrafanaRTTS
Watch this recorded webinar about real-time monitoring of application performance. See how to integrate Apache JMeter, the open-source leader in performance testing, with InfluxDB, the open-source time-series database, and Grafana, the open-source analytics and visualization application.
In this webinar, we will review the benefits of leveraging InfluxDB and Grafana when executing load tests and demonstrate how these tools are used to visualize performance metrics.
Length: 30 minutes
Session Overview
-------------------------------------------
During this webinar, we will cover the following topics while demonstrating the integrations of JMeter, InfluxDB and Grafana:
- What out-of-the-box solutions are available for real-time monitoring JMeter tests?
- What are the benefits of integrating InfluxDB and Grafana into the load testing stack?
- Which features are provided by Grafana?
- Demonstration of InfluxDB and Grafana using a practice web application
To view the webinar recording, go to:
https://www.rttsweb.com/jmeter-integration-webinar
Software Delivery At the Speed of AI: Inflectra Invests In AI-Powered QualityInflectra
In this insightful webinar, Inflectra explores how artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming software development and testing. Discover how AI-powered tools are revolutionizing every stage of the software development lifecycle (SDLC), from design and prototyping to testing, deployment, and monitoring.
Learn about:
• The Future of Testing: How AI is shifting testing towards verification, analysis, and higher-level skills, while reducing repetitive tasks.
• Test Automation: How AI-powered test case generation, optimization, and self-healing tests are making testing more efficient and effective.
• Visual Testing: Explore the emerging capabilities of AI in visual testing and how it's set to revolutionize UI verification.
• Inflectra's AI Solutions: See demonstrations of Inflectra's cutting-edge AI tools like the ChatGPT plugin and Azure Open AI platform, designed to streamline your testing process.
Whether you're a developer, tester, or QA professional, this webinar will give you valuable insights into how AI is shaping the future of software delivery.
UiPath Test Automation using UiPath Test Suite series, part 3DianaGray10
Welcome to UiPath Test Automation using UiPath Test Suite series part 3. In this session, we will cover desktop automation along with UI automation.
Topics covered:
UI automation Introduction,
UI automation Sample
Desktop automation flow
Pradeep Chinnala, Senior Consultant Automation Developer @WonderBotz and UiPath MVP
Deepak Rai, Automation Practice Lead, Boundaryless Group and UiPath MVP
Key Trends Shaping the Future of Infrastructure.pdfCheryl Hung
Keynote at DIGIT West Expo, Glasgow on 29 May 2024.
Cheryl Hung, ochery.com
Sr Director, Infrastructure Ecosystem, Arm.
The key trends across hardware, cloud and open-source; exploring how these areas are likely to mature and develop over the short and long-term, and then considering how organisations can position themselves to adapt and thrive.
UiPath Test Automation using UiPath Test Suite series, part 4DianaGray10
Welcome to UiPath Test Automation using UiPath Test Suite series part 4. In this session, we will cover Test Manager overview along with SAP heatmap.
The UiPath Test Manager overview with SAP heatmap webinar offers a concise yet comprehensive exploration of the role of a Test Manager within SAP environments, coupled with the utilization of heatmaps for effective testing strategies.
Participants will gain insights into the responsibilities, challenges, and best practices associated with test management in SAP projects. Additionally, the webinar delves into the significance of heatmaps as a visual aid for identifying testing priorities, areas of risk, and resource allocation within SAP landscapes. Through this session, attendees can expect to enhance their understanding of test management principles while learning practical approaches to optimize testing processes in SAP environments using heatmap visualization techniques
What will you get from this session?
1. Insights into SAP testing best practices
2. Heatmap utilization for testing
3. Optimization of testing processes
4. Demo
Topics covered:
Execution from the test manager
Orchestrator execution result
Defect reporting
SAP heatmap example with demo
Speaker:
Deepak Rai, Automation Practice Lead, Boundaryless Group and UiPath MVP
GraphRAG is All You need? LLM & Knowledge GraphGuy Korland
Guy Korland, CEO and Co-founder of FalkorDB, will review two articles on the integration of language models with knowledge graphs.
1. Unifying Large Language Models and Knowledge Graphs: A Roadmap.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.08302
2. Microsoft Research's GraphRAG paper and a review paper on various uses of knowledge graphs:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/graphrag-unlocking-llm-discovery-on-narrative-private-data/
DevOps and Testing slides at DASA ConnectKari Kakkonen
My and Rik Marselis slides at 30.5.2024 DASA Connect conference. We discuss about what is testing, then what is agile testing and finally what is Testing in DevOps. Finally we had lovely workshop with the participants trying to find out different ways to think about quality and testing in different parts of the DevOps infinity loop.
Connector Corner: Automate dynamic content and events by pushing a buttonDianaGray10
Here is something new! In our next Connector Corner webinar, we will demonstrate how you can use a single workflow to:
Create a campaign using Mailchimp with merge tags/fields
Send an interactive Slack channel message (using buttons)
Have the message received by managers and peers along with a test email for review
But there’s more:
In a second workflow supporting the same use case, you’ll see:
Your campaign sent to target colleagues for approval
If the “Approve” button is clicked, a Jira/Zendesk ticket is created for the marketing design team
But—if the “Reject” button is pushed, colleagues will be alerted via Slack message
Join us to learn more about this new, human-in-the-loop capability, brought to you by Integration Service connectors.
And...
Speakers:
Akshay Agnihotri, Product Manager
Charlie Greenberg, Host
2. Agenda What do you have? A portfolio to prioritize. What do you want? A prioritized portfolio. How will you do this? This deck will show you! Why should you care? Because this approach produces better results faster. And it’s fun. Is it real? Case studies from Cisco, HP, and VeriSign included. When can I get started? Right now. Contact us at: info@innovationgames.com.
3. The Essential Summary We prioritize your projects by engaging your global team in online tournaments. You have more projects to do than you can afford. We reduce execution risk by ensuring that you have checked your resources against your priorities. … … … … And yeah, the process is seriously fun… so keep reading!
4. What You Have: What You Want: A list of potential projects to prioritize. Some must be done “Run the Business” Some are new A fixed budget. A motivated team. A prioritized list of projects. An understanding of which projects can be funded given available resources. This presentation will define a process you can use for strategic portfolio prioritization.
5. Here is the High-Level Process Organize Your Portfolio Prioritize Your Portfolio Using Innovation Games® Online Tournaments Confirm Resource Requirements UsingInnovation Games® Resource Games Execute on Your Portfolio! We’ll review each of these steps!
6. Start By Gathering Your Portfolio Start by making a single list of all your potential projects. Some are “Run the Business” (RtB) projects. Some are “New Projects”. Just throw everything into the same list.
7. Remove The Obvious You probably know right away that some projects just won’t get done. Since we don’t want you wasting time prioritizing projects you know you’re not going todo, file them away so you can examine them again in the future.
8. Split the Big List Into Two Smaller Lists These are your existing projects. We call these “Run the Business” (RtB) projects. For example, publishing a monthly newsletter is a RtB project. These are potential new projects. You can identify these by playing Innovation Games® like Prune the Product Tree or Speed Boat.
9. Why Split the Big List? Most corporations want to guarantee that they will allocate some money to new projects. Splitting the list ensures that you’re not letting all of your existing work crowd out all of your new work. The people playing the online prioritization games need the chance to think differently about each group of projects.
10. Prepare Each Project For The Games Make sure each project has: A short and snappy name. A brief description. An outline of the benefits. An estimated cost. Your estimated cost can be fairly precise (e.g., based on past experience, you might know an RtB project costs $150K). Your estimated cost can be a rough estimate (we recommend “shirt sizes”, like S, M, L, XL). As long as you are consistent in how you price your items you’ll be OK.
11. How Many Projects Are On Your Lists? If you’re like other companies, chances are good that each of your lists contains 20 to 80+ projects. And you probably can’t afford to do all of them. The next step is to learn how to collaboratively prioritize a list of 12 to 20 items through the Innovation Game® Buy a Feature. We’ll then extend this to many games to prioritize your entire list through a Buy a Feature Tournament!
12. How to Get a Group of People To Prioritize a List of Projects…And Have Fun Doing It!The Innovation Game® Buy a Feature
13. Buy a Feature: A Collaborative Prioritization Game! 12-20 items described in terms of benefits and costs 5 to 8 players given limited budget Purchased items represent shared priorities Chat logs shape results A Game To Prioritize Stuff
14. Portfolio Team To illustrate how Buy a Feature works, let’s imagine you make coffee makers and you want to prioritize a list of potential features (or projects) with your global product planning team.
15. First, You Will Load Items Into Our System “Shirt Sizes” help you quickly price your features – or you can enter a price directly! A list of features with prices. See any you like?
17. Players are given a limited virtual budget to buy features. Player bids. Highly desired features are purchased through collaborative negotiation. Players chat during the game providing you with rich insights that shape the projects. Players Collaboratively Purchase Projects E F G H
18. Analyze Results to Identify the “What and Why” of Important Projects ANALYZE Who purchased what? How much did they bid? Who negotiated with whom? What did they say? How did they shape the projects? E F G H
19. Play Several Games To Identify Trends We’ve played 35 Coffee Maker games with more than 150 people from around the world. Here are the results. The “red” bar means that in some games players spent MORE money than needed. These results are scaled based on the number of times an item was purchased. All data from the games can be downloaded into Excel for detailed analysis.
20. And yes, it is FUN Chat log extracts from three games played to prioritize a product backlog.
21. We Use a Tournament For Large Numbers of Projects Game 1 15 Projects Game 3 Winners of games 1 & 2 Game 2 16 Projects … … … … Game 5 Game 5 16 Projects 46 projects… Example: Suppose you had 46 projects. We would run a 5 game tournament. Since each game will have 7 players, you’ve just engaged 35 people!
22. To Increase ConfidenceRun Several Tournaments Each Tournament produces a unique result based on the employees invited to play each game. Patterns always emerge! This is an example inspired by real projects for a F500 company! Mobility Engagement is the obvious winner! Three Tournaments will engage more than 100 of your global employees!
23. Tournament Results & Benefits What: A prioritized list projects. Why: The reasons behind the priorities. Who: Instead of asking a few leaders to make the decision, our approach leverages the wisdom of your “employee crowd”. Engagement: Instead of a few long and boring meetings, you play many one hour games. Buy-In: Employees’ engagement creates tremendous buy-in and fast execution.
24. Leaders Still Lead – Even When Results Might Be Surprising This is how the VeriSign employees prioritized their list. The VeriSign leadership team felt a project that didn’t win ANY games was important. Solution? The VeriSign leadership team chose to pursue the project they felt was important. To maintain buy-in, they implemented a careful education plan that explained why this project was ultimately chosen.
26. Do You Have the Resources? Even with a prioritized list, you may not have enough resources to fund all desired projects. Insufficiently funded projects fail to realize their potential and frustrate teams. Solution? Run ANOTHER set of Buy a Feature games, this time using resource requirements and resource capacity as the game currency.
27. Start By Defining Your Strategic Allocation Model This is your total budget. Allocate by percentages. This is the portion of the budget that will be allocated to existing “Run the Business” projects. This example allocates 70% of the budget to RtB. 70% This is the portion of the budget that will be allocated to “new” projects. We find that companies typically allocate between 20% - 50% of their budget to “new” projects. 30%
28. Allocate Budgets Based On The Model Actual Budget Dollars Assume a $6M budget. RtB = $6M * 70% = $4.2M New = $6M * 30% = $1.8M Person-Days 20 engineers work 220 days/year. 20 * 220 = 4400 person-days RtB = 4400 * 70% = 3080pd New= 4400 * 30% = 1320pd Now you have a sense of your organizational capacity and how it should be roughly allocated.
29. Resource Allocation For New Projects Develop a realistic cost (not shirt sizes): New Project A 370 pd -- or -- $222,000 New Project B 560 pd -- or -- $336,000 Put the projects into a Buy a Feature game. Give each player their portion of the capacity. Total “new project” capacity is $1.8M. If you have 8 players, each gets $225K. Play the game. Analyze the results.Which projects are fully funded? Which are partially funded? Can it be simplified? Should you fight for more resources? Should you take on fewer projects but execute them better?
30. Which Currency is Best? You can use any currency for the resource allocation game: person-hours, story-points, estimated project costs, etc. The requirements are: The projects must be reflective of actual cost. The resources given to players must be reflective of organizational capacity. Don’t play a game claiming you have a $45M project budget when you really only have $30M!
