Hey There!

Hope you enjoyed the first part of our series on “Innovation Games”!

The next Innovation Game in our series is “Speed Boat”. This is a fun way to do retrospectives and feedback meetings where there is need for all team members to voice their opinions in an open and anonymous way. This method reduces the duration of the meeting to almost one half and gets better results which may indeed be very useful for the improvement of the agile team.

Game Objective:

• To find the impeding and the helping factors in achieving any goal. It can be used as a fun way of doing retrospectives, as it engages the team and brings out the concern areas.

Method:

• Let’s take one iteration or sprint for retrospective. Draw a boat with a Sail on front end and Anchors pulling it down at the back end.
• All participants are given post-its to write down the factors that they think helped them move faster and post them on the sails; the factors that impeded their speed in that iteration and post them on the anchors.
• We may also look for the desired factors which may help more in future and label them as the wind.

Analysis:

This feedback may be saved by just keeping a picture of this chart for revisit in the next sprint , or by saving the post-its as notes.The take-away would be to keep checking in the next sprints that we—

• Minimize the anchors
• Maximize the Sailing factors
• Try and bring in the wind factors in the next iterations

This is a very useful tool to bring in better results from our retrospective meetings , give it a try in your agile team and let us know how it worked out!

Cheers,

Nishi