Agile Dinner in Tampere 20090514 - Business Value Game Workshop

Post-workshop feedback

After the workshop almost everybody kindly filled the feedback sheets and here is a quick summary.

Average numbers

• How good was the workshop (1-10)? - 8.75
• How much were your goals for the session satisfied (1-10)? - 8.5
• How likely are you to recommend this game to your friends (1-10) - 9.14

What was most good

• "constructism of basic things, focusing on important things"
• "nicely simplified quite complex factors of business value, but not oversimplifying things"
• "breakdown between 2, 4, and 6th iterations. Competitive, but friendly atmosphere"
• "realizing that simple can be good"
• "the game was well planned. Every decision seemed to have some effect to the outcome and it wasn't just luck"

What could be improved

• Rules could be explained in a bigger details
• It would be great if accounting would be a bit simpler
• Explanation of bigger number of prioritization methods would be helpful (though may have took the focus from the game itself)

Orginal invitation below

The next Agile Dinner in Tampere will be held on Thursday, May 14 2009, 18:00 in Restaurant Plevna (Game will start 19:00 in Plevna's Mallaskabinetti). Ask for "AgileFinland" to find the right table.

Place: Mallaskabinetti in Restaurant Plevna, Itäinenkatu 8, Tampere. You don't have to register, but it would help to bring the correct amount of materials and reserve the table of correct size.

Advance preparations:

Time for dinner is quite short, so please try making your choice in advance so that you could order right away

• Menu in Finnish - http://www.plevna.fi/ruo_ver.php
• Menu in English - http://www.plevna.fi/menu_sta.php

Program:

• 18:00 - 19:00 Dinner and discussion
• 19:00 - 20:30 Business Value Game workshop in Mallaskabinetti
• 20:30 - Beer and free discussion

Business Value Game

If you want to be a successful software development company, you have to make sure you work on the stories that bring most value to the customer. Ideally you have an on-site customer that can tell you which story can bring most value. What do you do if you don't have luxury of having the on-site customer? Or how does on-site customer decide what is of the biggest importance to him? How does your company prioritize epics, stories and projects? This session gives you some simple business value estimation techniques that are "good enough" for the everyday use. You will learn how to assign business value to projects and stories, prioritize and make plans that bring value. You will also learn the ways for teaching this.

The session is run as a game, where teams of "businesspeople" have to make plans for their development team. The goal of the game is to earn as much money as possible by delivering features and stories with the highest possible business value. No preparation is needed and the game should be of particular fun to the players new to agile.

This game has been presented on several agile conferences, was a big hit on Scan-Agile in Helsinki last year and I will also run it on XP2009this year. Now it is run in Tampere. Come and feel the business value origins!

Registration

If you are coming, please click "Attend" and add your name to the registration list below. The game will be fun with any number of people from 6 to 30 (more than 30 won't fit in Mallaskabinetti).

Company field is optional and gathered out of curiosity only.