Taking Innovation Games for a SPIN

I'm a big fan of Luke Hohmann's Innovation Games. They are a fun way to gather qualitative information about your products from your customers. At last month's Austin SPIN (Software Process Improvement Network) meeting, I had the privilege to help facilitate some Innovation Games. Jeff Brantley did the heavy lifting and presented an overview of the games included in Luke's book. Then, we divided up the group and played a couple of games.

My group played Speedboat to get some ideas around what things were slowing down people's process improvement efforts. I chose this topic since it had been mentioned at last month's meeting that the officers were soliciting ideas for topics at future SPIN meetings. Instead of waiting for folks to email items in, playing Speedboat gave us a chance to quickly get ideas and conversation from a dozen people all at the same time. As we looked at similarities between items, two areas that stood out to me were "people issues"- getting and keeping commitment from people at different levels in the company and cumbersome change processes (ie- Change Control Boards (CCBs)). Plus, everyone got some experience with a game.

I've been impressed with the Austin SPIN meetings I've been to recently. The group is energetic and engaged and the officers seem very focused on bringing in topics and presenters that have something to give. I've learned new things at each one and this professional development focus differs from the SPIN meetings I'd been to previously. Admittedly, those meeting were over 10 years ago, but they seemed to feature a speaker trying to sell a tool and a bunch of people looking for jobs. Neither is a bad thing, in and of itself, but the mismatch between presenter and audience made for a depressing evening. Not so anymore!

Another thing that this meeting reinforced was the flexibility of the games. Besides being great for getting qualitative market research, I've used them for retrospectives, community learning around Agile requirements, and process improvements. Jeff mentioned using them with churches and community groups for planning. And now for generating program ideas. Leave me a note with any other uses you've found for Innovation Games.

Now, get out and play!

Intro #1: What School Are You?

I always like when there is some introductory material on a blog- it gives you a sense of where someone's coming from and can help you understand their perspective. I'll have a couple of these posts- I have one from my former company's blog and I'll copy it here. Not because it is so valuable it needs to be reprinted :), but I'm not sure how long Borland's "Agile Transformation" blog will remain up now that they've been bought by Micro Focus. And I think it does a pretty good job of presenting where I'm coming from on process issues. So, here is "What School Are You?" (originally published at: http://borland.typepad.com/agile_transformation/2008/10/what-school-are.html) :

"I kicked around several ideas for an introductory post, trying to balance giving some personal background with something of broader interest....Trying to balance answering "Who am I?" for you, without being vain enough for you to instead ask "Who does this guy think he is?" Asking the question in the title gives me a good balance.

One of the ideas that has really helped me on understanding "Agile Transformations", both in myself and in teams that I see and work with is the concept of "shuhari", which defines the stages of mastering Japanese martial arts. Shu is the level when you start and are loyal to the "school" you are learning from- you're following the practices by the book. Ha is when you are understanding more of the principles behind the practices so you can go beyond the practices you learned in your school- how to extend them to situations not originally envisioned or what to do when a practice used to work or what ideas from another school you'd like to mix in. I get these two, but Ri? Ri is defined as transcendence when all moves are natural. I'll let you know if I experience this transcendence! In my book, it's not too terribly important where you start since people around you will get to the point that they're pulling in ideas from other schools. Or they'll be dogmatically stuck to the starting school and you won't want to hang around them.

So, what "school" are you when it comes to development and how to improve? For me, I started out seeing many different approaches to doing things better- some measurement driven, some from a maturity model, some from a vendor. It wasn't until we started using Scrum inside Borland that I saw something that I really believed in - the other results I saw from the others were just too mixed. Sure, Scrum's results are mixed but the experiences I've seen are much more on the positive side of the ledger. So, would I say I'm of the Scrum school? Or even the Schwaber Scrum school since that is the first book I had? Or the Mike Cohn Scrum school since he was the trainer in my first ScrumMaster training?

Nope. None of the above. While appreciating Scrum, serving as a ScrumMaster and seeing the way it benefits teams, I was exploring other areas of the Agile world and finding other approaches that resonate more with me. I haven't done hardcore XP. I'd like to say I'm of the Real Options school, but I'm not sure I could pass the entrance exam. The area that resonates the most for me is Lean, whether described by the Poppendiecks, David Anderson or Corey Ladas and crew. My personal exploration and experience with these schools of thought will be one of the many areas I cover in this blog.

So I'm interested to know, what school are you? "

(Originally posted by Michael Maham on October 29, 2008 at 07:20 AM)