Agility in Action… This session will introduce five interactive games that a facilitator can add to their toolkit for team and management training. The games all illustrate the principles and dynamics that support Agility. The rationale for this session is that people learn best by embodying the learning, rather than just receiving knowledge at a head level. All participants will be immersed in the games; there are no observers. At the end of the session the participants will have a set of games they can introduce into their own organization to enhance their own Agile adoption process.

The use of metaphorical games as a strategy for adopting an agile culture has shown to be weak because most of trainers don’t know the principles of changing beliefs and values of a human mind. The Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) Logical Levels of Learning and Change (LLLC) is a powerful framework to be considered when we need to challenge skeptical and analytical minds in traditional software development environments.

We find games and simulations incredibly valuable in our coaching and training. Given the number of times we’ve seen “Does anyone have a game or simulation to … ?” on the mail lists, we know we’re not alone. While there’s leverage in using games that others create, it’s even better to create your own games to address your specific teaching points. In this session, we will introduce some essential elements of game design and demonstrate a process for designing a game starting with a learning objective. Participants will then use materials we supply to create their own Agile games.

When it is achieved together, the combined benefits of both Agile and Offshore software development, can be multiples greater than either approach alone. During this interactive session, we will simulate a distributed project with some participants being onsite and the others offshore. With 4 teams of upto 8 people each, this game will draw out learning around the challenges of Distributed Agile and different methods to communicate successfully on such projects. The rules of the game help illustrate how to deal with travel, different timezones, delayed communication and other such hurdles.