“People rarely succeed unless they have fun in what they are doing.”
Agile culture is considered truly accomplished when team members feel free and empowered to share their views and ideas without any fear of rejection and criticism. Various occasions we must have faced where we see team members experiencing dull and lazy sprint retrospectives. Sprints where no one speaks up their mind result in less generated innovative and creative ideas. Making teams generate various creative ideas is one of the difficult tasks for managers. Project/ product managers constantly have to find ways to keep on motivating the team members, collaborating, and communicating with customers to understand their area of interest. To get this difficult task done innovative games help the product and project managers.
An innovative game is a fun way to hack into the agile and obtain high performance and productivity. To the people coming from the traditional working way, this may sound crazy, but they will think why include games while working? We come for work and not to play. But including various games in work provides various benefits to the team. Some of the main benefits of innovative games are mentioned below.
Benefits of Innovative Games
Boost Familiarity
It makes team members comfortable with the agile environment and concepts. As the games are strongly connected with human development and intelligence it helps the individual connect with the concept and each other in an approachable way and also makes it fun.
Develop engagement and enthusiasm
An individual grasps the concepts more easily when introduced to games. When agile principles and practices are introduced to team members by presentation, slides, or oral ways it makes it hard to understand or remember throughout. But when they are introduced to the games while playing they are more enthusiastic to learn them and also quick to understand and remember them for a longer time as they are engaged with them practically while playing.
Improvise problem solving and creativity
With lots of going on in team members' minds, leaving no time to go for off-the-wall creative ideas they have made their creative muscles rigid with the passing of time. While playing games provide an opportunity for team members to flex their creative muscles and also improve their skill of problem-solving without their knowledge as it creates various occasion of brainstorming for innovative solutions to handle at hand.
Promote team cohesion
The game playing is generally very collaborative making its participant interact a lot. Recommended games in agile are not so competitive, making teams unite to tackle a shared challenge. This helps participants learn to interact and work together.
By combining all the above benefits we will be able to have an outstanding team. In agile innovative games are generally classified into the five main categories while using it. The classification is based mainly on the introduction provided by Luke Hohmann in his book.
Classification
Based on Purpose
Classification is described based on the purpose or main goal of playing the games. By keeping the main aim of playing it is needed to select the suitable game which will provide the required outcome.
Idealizing the market needs- Some games are specifically designed to have complete insight into the market needs. These are further used as input in strategic planning and identifying business opportunities.
Product usage and relationship- these games provide insight on regularly evolving products and customers’ usage of the product in the market.
Product Functionality- It gives an understanding of the jobs customers are striving to accomplish.
Shaping for the future- These games allow you to involve customers in shaping your enterprise's future.
Based on Degree of Physical Preparation
High
Medium
Low
Based on Degree of Open-Ended Exploration
This classification is based on the requirements of the games and also of the team while playing the games. Are there any constraints to be applied or it can be played with open-ended exploration?
High
Medium
Low
Based on Scalability
Generally, innovative games are designed for a small number of people or groups. But they can also be scaled for larger groups when required. The larger groups can be sub-divided into smaller groups to play the games and change the degree of facilitation in the games.
Low
Medium
High
Based on the Time Frame of Action
Games are also classified based on the time frame requires to play them. As there are times when we don’t have too much time to entertain the participants for a longer time and need to have the results in the provided time box.
Low
Medium
High
In agile we have seldom heard teams stating “Work is much more fun than fun” where innovative games are introduced in the process. With the proper understanding of the requirement and usage, selecting the games accordingly in a cluster or individually will provide team and team members with the required outcomes with many other benefits.
About Advance Agility
We, at Advance Agility, are the new-age Agile Coaching, Consulting and IT services company. We enable end-to-end Digital Transformation. Agile execution is integral to our being. We are doing SAFe implementation with small, medium and large organization across the globe. Our vision is to be the leading Agile execution player globally. To keep adding value at every process stage. We are on a mission to empower our clients, move from concept to cash in the shortest sustainable lead time by adopting human centric approach to business agility. Embracing the change is in our DNA. Things that keep us apart are Quicker and Seamless execution with End-to-end gamut of services. Our Global presence and Stellar Track Record give us an edge over our competitor.
Connect with us at advanceagility.com to learn about SAFe and SAFe Implementation. Write to us at contact@advanceagilty.com for any agile training or consulting needs. We are always looking for competent agile trainers as well. So if you are a good trainer or want to become one, do get in touch with us to that we can learn, grow and achieve together.
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