Dhaval Panchal’s - Agile Blog

This is a variation of “Value Flow” exercise that Sanjeev Augustine did at Scrumgathering 2009 in Orlando. I found this exercise very useful to demonstrate the benefits of prioritization and lower batch sizes. I have facilitated a variation on this exercise with different learning objectives. Below is a detailed description of how I run this exercise.

Time:

15 - 20 minutes

Input:

• 20 coins of different kinds (1,5,10,25 etc)
• Secret stash of 20 coins of different kinds (1,5,10,25 etc)
• Table large enough for 4 persons
• Stopwatch (1)
• Participants (5)
• Facilitator (1)
• Time keeper (1)
• Flip Chart or Whiteboard
• Chart or Whiteboard markers

Setup:

• Create a table as shown below on a flip chart or White Board

	Round 1	Round 2	Round 3
All Coins
1st Coin
Total Value

• Participant roles
  • Delivery Team member (4)
  • CEO/Portfolio Manager/Product Owner (1)

Exercise Steps:

Round 1: Batch Size ALL

1. Ensure all team members can flip or toss a coin.

2. The first delivery team member flips a coin until it turns heads. Repeats this step for all the 20-25 coins.

3. Only after the first person is done with all the coins, the second delivery person works on the first coin in the batch until (s)he is done is with all the coins.

4. The third person picks up the entire batch and then the fourth.

5. Time keeper records the time taken for the first coin to be flipped to heads by the last team member.

6. Time keeper records the time taken for all the coins to be flipped to heads by the last team member.

7. CEO/Product Owner calculates the sum total of monetary value represented by the coins.

Facilitator sets up context that the organization is facing stiff competition and they have to deliver much faster that they did in Round 1.

Round 2: Improve Time to Market!

1. Facilitator removes the restriction that one person has to complete all the coins before the next person can pick any of the coins. Team members do have to follow the sequence of processing through team members.

2. Facilitator asks for the delivery team to do a quick 2 minute retrospective on Round 1and plan for the how they will approach the same problem without the restriction of flipping all coins before passing to next step.

3. Facilitator kicks off round 2, at the end of time box. Delivery team members may ask for more time for retrospective, but it’s important that facilitator holds the 2 minute time box sacred.

4. Delivery team begins flipping coins

5. Time keeper records the time taken for the first coin to be flipped appropriately by the last team member.

6. Time keeper records the time taken for all the coins to be flipped appropriately by the last team member.

7. CEO/Product Owner calculates the sum total of monetary value represented by the coins.

Facilitator sets up the context, that although the time to market was okay, competitors have gained parity and the organization has to focus on delivering higher customer value. They need to improve on that!

Round 3: Competitive Threat!;Prioritize and fix release date

1. Facilitator asks for the delivery team to do a quick 2 minute retrospective on Round 2 and plan for the how they will approach the problem this time.

2. While the team is doing a retrospective, facilitator asks the CEO/Product Owner to prioritize coins based on their monetary value.

3. Facilitator declares a time box for round 3. This time box should be the lesser of 4 minutes or the time taken to flip all coins by everyone in Round 2.

4. Delivery team begins flipping coins.

5. When the first dime comes off the line, tell the team “customer feedback, dimes have no value”

6. Facilitator hands secret stash, another random collection, of coins to the CEO/Product owner.

7. CEO/Product owner can reprioritize the new collection with other coins that have not yet been picked up by the first person.

8. At the end of declared time box, time keeper declares time. Out.

9. CEO/Product Owner calculates the sum total of monetary value represented by the coins.

Debrief:

Facilitator debriefs participants and other witnesses on the exercise. This will vary significantly depending on people’s experiences. The intention of the three rounds is thus:

Round 1, sets up the organization to deliver fixed value (total monetary value of coins). Team members usually are working at a frantic pace to get most through put with the CEO/Product owner cheering them on.

Round2, is still about delivering fixed value however after the retrospective team members intuitively reduce the batch size. So instead of passing 20 coins at a time, they hand off 2 to 3 coins at a time to the next person in line. I have observed that as compared to round 1, the team takes much lesser time to deliver on the same. Improved time to market!

Round 3, is delivering about maximum value with in fixed time box. This is significantly different than Round 1 and Round 2 since in this case the product ship date is fixed. Somewhere in round 3 by injecting customer feedback that “all dimes are useless”, induces additional uncertainity since no one can predict customer behavior/trend. At the end of round 3 time box, team often delivers higher value than round 2 and round 1 even with the uncertainity induced through customer feedback. Debrief points are around product owner prioritization, injection of customer feedback and fixed release dates.

The coins in this exercise may represent features or projects within a portfolio. It is very hard to kill projects/features even after we know that they are not worth the effort. There is tremendous value in killing low value high cost projects. Have fun! I’d appreciate if you provide feedback or tell me how it went for your team.

Facilitation Exercises, Product Backlog Add new tag, coaching, exercise, product owner, release, scrum, value

The role of a Product Owner with in Scrum teams or that of a Customer in XP teams is critical to the success of the product. What to do? - when they take vaction. What are your options? Say your product owner is going on a planned vacation for a couple of weeks, effectively unavailable to the team for an entire sprint. Based on my experience at coaching and working with Agile teams, I have found following options that do not work:

1. The business owner (PO’s boss) takes the solo role of the product owner over.

Pro: Business Owner is the single representative voice of customer. Business Owner has the authority and the responsibility to make product decisions.

Con: S/He is not available for much of the time, delaying decisions.

Con: Business Owner does not have detailed knowledge of the domain.

Your PO’s boss most often will not have time to spend with the team and lack of domain knowledge renders the business owner dangerous to provide direction for a sprint. Also, given his seniority he may have other important stuff to take care, like assuming non-PO responsibilities that your PO was fulfilling within the organization.

2. Hybrid: UX Questions go to Interaction Designer, Reporting Questions go to Business Intelligence Analyst, Strategic Product Questions go to the Business Owner. Scrum master is quarter back for these questions – ensuring they are routed to the right place. When there are unresolved questions, they are decided by Business Owner.

Pro: Balances workload among contributing experts

Con: More workload on the scrum master

Con: Communication may break down between different members

Con: Who accepts stories?

Too many people wearing the virtual PO hat with the real PO in vacation and the real-temporary PO behind the scenes. Too much confusion for anyone’s taste.

3. The product owner postpones vacation.

Pro: Team doesn’t loose their product owner

Con: Delay in vacation causes trip prices to climb in the summer

This option is really not sustainable, people ought to be able to take vacation and not penalized for doing a good job.

4. Get another analyst to come up to speed. Someone comes on the project two weeks earlier to understand the domain and serves as proxy during the sprint.

Pro: Keeps the single decision maker.

Pro: Availability of analysts is more realistic than Business Owner taking this over

Con: Unfamiliar with the domain.

Startup time/cost to get a proxy product owner ready means effort spent by current PO and other team members during prior sprint which may cause drop in delivery of valuable functionality that would have been delivered otherwise.

5. Product Owner answers emails from Europe with 1 day time lag

Pro: Single decision maker is kept

Con: Time delay for questions, reducing velocity

Then it is not a vacation and true product owners take vacations!

What can you do?

One of the team member assumes a dual role of Product Owner and Team member. Ensure that this is not the scrum master.

Sooner or later, the PO has to trust the team to make domain level/product level decisions. Hopefully during these previous sprints the team has had an insight into PO’s thinking process and gained insight into PO’s implicit knowledge about how the product should work and feel. There may be some Subject Matter Expertise, like biz rules, that they need from other Analysts and they can ask these SME’s for guidance however the responsibility of final product should not seep out of the Scrum team (SM + PO + Dev team). Also, having a team member play this dual role is better than

i. Training a new person to play proxy role. (option 4)

ii. Getting a less domain knowledge person make decisions (option 1)

iii. Causing identity crisis for the rest of organization (option 2) ;)

The worst that can happen is that the person who is playing the dual roles, blows-up a two week sprint. On the bad side, 2 – weeks’ worth time and effort is lost. However on the good side, the PO will know how well the development team has so far understood PO’s product vision and incremental steps so far (previous sprints) towards that vision. A great learning opportunity! (Above mentioned worst case can also happen with option 1, 2 and 4 however there can be tendency to cop out and blame the “outsider” rather than look inwards and see where a team can learn.)

There are two characteristics that I seek in my suggested solution:

1. Learning opportunity

2. Avoid diffusion/confusion of responsibility

Many thanks to Ed Kraay, my collegue and friend at SolutionsIQ, who recently helped one of our client product owner’s to fulfill his vacation commitment.

Experience Good Practice, product owner, team, velocity