Agile game - Pass the pennies
Learning lean principles of pull, flow and system thinking
Timing: 10-15 mins
Ingredients:
- 20 Pennies (any kind)
- 4 departments (1 worker per dep. sitting at table)
- 4 dep. managers with stopwatch
- 1 CEO (with stopwatch)
Directions:
Game has three turns - each with different batch size [20, 5 and 1].
Workers job is to flip the pennies he receives as fast as he can and then pass them on to next. Department managers job is to take time his worker spends from the first to the last coin flipped. CEO takes total time from the first coin to the last.
For fun, let managers have a "one-on-one" chat with his worker after each round.
Display results on a flipchart:
|
|
20 coin batch | 5 coin batch | 1 coin batch |
| Department 1 | 10s | 17s | 12s |
| Department 2 | 12s | ... | |
| Department 3 | |||
| Department 4 | |||
| Total | .. | .. | .. |
Learning Points:
- When batchsize decreases, total cycle time decreases
- As total time decreases, worker time increases!
- People idle more when batch size is high
CREDIT: Agile Coachcamp members
Re: Agile game - Pass the pennies
Great exercise, it's now a staple on my CSM courses! A really simple and powerful way to demonstrate how cycle time gets messed up by suboptimization and batching. Thanks George Dinwiddie for showing it to us at the Agile Coach Camp in Michigan!