Agile games: The coin game

The coin game is a great way to help show the benefits of breaking work down into small, valuable chunks. It can be run with C-level executives, senior managers and teams that are looking to move towards a more agile approach.

Setup

You will need £20 worth of coins (smaller amounts will also work) in various denominations from £2 to 1p, here is an example of the coins used to play:

Each person in the group will take a role, if the group is large then you can split them into smaller groups of equal numbers. The roles can be aligned to roles currently used on the organisation or you can use some from this list: Product Owner, Developer, Tester, Integrator & Customer. You can adjust the roles to fit the team size.

Playing the game

In each of the rounds the aim is to get all the coins to the customer as quickly as possible. Before starting, create a results table like the one below to record the times for each round:

Round 1 - Batch

In this round the first person (Product Owner) will start with all the coins stacked vertically in front of them, they will need to turn over each coin and stack them again before passing the entire stack of coins to the next person in the team, every person will need to do this until the stack of coins reaches the customer. Once everyone is clear of the instructions, start the timer… when the stack of coins reaches the customer you can stop the timer and record the time taken.

Round 2 - Agile

In this round the team has broken the work down into small chunks, make sure the coins are randomly ordered. The first person (Product Owner) must turn over a coin and then they can pass this coin on to the next person who must turn the coin over and so on until the coin reaches the customer. The first person can start to turn the next coin as soon as they’ve turned the previous one and so on. Once everyone is clear of the instructions, start the timer… when the first coin reaches the customer record the time but don’t stop the timer, when the last coin reaches the customer you can stop the timer and record the time taken.

Round 3 - Value

This round is very similar to round 2. The team has broken the work down into small chunks and prioritised them into the highest value first i.e. £2 coin will be highest, followed by the £1’s, 50p’s, 20p’s, 10p’s, 5p’s, 2p’s and then the 1p’s. The first person (Product Owner) must turn over the highest value coin and then they can pass this coin on to the next person who must turn the coin over and so on until the coin reaches the customer. The first person can start to turn the next highest value coin as soon as they’ve turned the previous one and so on. Once everyone is clear of the instructions, start the timer… when the first coin reaches the customer record the time but don’t stop the timer, when the last coin reaches the customer you can stop the timer and record the time taken.

Analysing the results

When I’ve run this with various teams the results are normally very clear for everyone to see. Here is an example set of results that I’ll use to explain outcomes with:

It’s clear to see that by breaking the work down into small chunks the teams can deliver value earlier to the customer, which can then be used, and feedback provided, and overall it normally takes less time to deliver all the value.

On first reflection you could argue that there is very little difference between the agile and value rounds, and in terms of the time taken you’d be right. However, what if the team was told to stop working on the product after 1 minute? In the agile round, where the coins are sorted randomly the team might have delivered a lot of low value items in that time but some of the highest value pieces of work might not have been started. In contrast, the value round means that the highest value items are delivered to the customer early and after the 1 minute most of the total value will have been delivered.