The global health crisis has changed our habits. We used to meet all together, now we have to keep our distance. We trainers used to meet "face to face" with the people we were training, to be able to share with them interactive moments, workshops and games like Lego4Scrum. We had to adapt ourselves to keep this alive.
A rather well known game in the agility world is Lego4Scrum. You will find many explanations about it on the website dedicated to this workshop. The objective is to build a Lego city according to an empirical, iterative approach, in this case according to the rules of the Scrum framework. And thus, generally, to discover what Scrum is and how it works. All this while having a good time, because it's fun!
It can be played with one or more teams and up to several dozen people. Oriented towards a common goal (the teams collaborate, they do not compete), and as the teams build, they use the feedback from the person who expressed their needs to adapt.
How to play Lego4Scrum without Lego...
... and without human contact? This was the question that arose from the beginning of the first confinement. So we chose to make the game board digital. The concept of building a city in teams according to a Scrum approach remains valid: it is the tools that change.
The Pixel4Scrum starts from this intention. It allows you to discover, in two to three hours, the Scrum way of working in a life-size practical exercise. All this using a shared work area (Google Sheets in this case, with the little boxes that act as pixels to be colored) rather than sheets of paperboard and Lego.
There is no other tool to use for a game. You don't have to create an account on any platform, no need to juggle between different tools. Almost everyone in the audiences I saw participating in this game had already used Excel, to do everything and its opposite(my colleague Damien will tell you about it better than I can here). We try to make the learning process as quick as possible, to focus on the essential: understanding an empirical approach, in this case Scrum.
I want to lead a Pixel4Scrum, how does it work?
The game board and detailed instructions for running a game are available on a Google Drive folder folder, read-only (to avoid unintentional changes). You can duplicate this in a Google Drive folder of your choice and modify it as you wish.
The game is available to anyone who wishes to use or modify it, even for commercial use (Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 license). It is very likely that it will evolve in the future, depending on the feedback we receive and that we invite you, in the same spirit, to share with as many people as possible.
If you want to facilitate a game, I advise you to read the complete document that explains the roles, what is expected from each participant, the lessons to be learned from the exercise... before you start.
You will also find on this site, on the blog of the association Agile Montpellier, the recording of a Meetup in which we played this game (about twenty people).
If you want to participate as a player to discover Scrum, it's a game that becomes really interesting from 4 players (excluding the facilitator), so I advise you to form a group to start, and eventually to contact us if you want to facilitate this game in your context. In this case, try not to read the document I mentioned above, in order to keep a minimum of surprise on the day !
Contact us for more information!
At SmartView, we animate this game in the "Agility, understanding the approach" training sessions (over three days) which correspond to the first level of acculturation to what agility is and to the different ways of operating in order to become more agile. And it's always a good time shared between the players and us!
As mentioned above, we can also facilitate it in dedicated sessions (e.g.: company seminars).
We hope to see you soon to share this moment with you!
