We enjoyed an opportunity to hang out with Jeff Patton in the Obtiva office for a few days recently. He was pairing with Dave on Mad Mimi most of that time. But, we all know that all work and no play makes <fill in name> a dull boy, so being geeks, we took a break to play a new game that Jeff suggested.
The Coin Flip Game (my name) demonstrates the efficiencies gained in a Lean/Agile production environment when compared to waterfall environments. The concepts this game demonstrates are explained by the Theory of Constraints and optimal work queue sizing. The idea is to deliver several coin flipping "projects." The first project is waterfall-style with Requirements, Design, Implementation, Verification, and Maintenance phases. Running the waterfall project will give us a baseline process cycle time, or the time it takes to send a given batch of work through the process from start to finish.
To run the waterfall project, start by creating stations at a table for each of the 5 waterfall phases. Have one person man each station. Line up 10 coins at the Requirements station, all facing heads up. Start a timer. Each station must flip all 10 coins. Once all the coins are flipped, the coins are pushed to the next station. Each station flips and pushes. Once the last station has received and flipped all the coins, the timer stops. Record the time taken as the process cycle time.
For the Agile project, set up the coins and stations exactly as above. This time, though, each person flips and pushes the coins in units of 5 instead of 10. Again, time the result.
Run another Agile project, but with 2 coins being flipped and pushed at a time, and, finally, with only 1 coin at a time.
The theory is that reducing the size and increasing the frequency of the work unit batches being pushed through the stations should increase the overall efficiency of the entire process. Playing the game demonstrates that process cycle time is directly related to batch size but inversely related to batch frequency. If each station receives smaller and more predictable work batches into their queue, it should be easier to manage, and there should be less time spent on low value activities while waiting for another large batch of work to hit the queue.
We took 26.2 seconds to deliver our coins via waterfall. The last Agile project we delivered had 1 coin iterations and was delivered in only 13.1 seconds.
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