Speed Boat - An Agile Retrospection Game

Speed Boat:

Objective:

• What is driving your boat (Sprint, project, or Agile adoption forward)

• What are the anchors slowing it down?

Game explained:

One of the most important facet that the agile world exposes is seeking feedback. Deriving feedback as a team for the team is the most essential element that makes the team.

Speed boat an Agile Innovation Game is a fun way of doing a retrospective, it engages participants and also delivers value.

As an example, consider your (Speed boat) to be your iteration. A successful Iteration is the one that has completed its projected velocity (The Island)

1. On the post-it’s given to you, write down things that you as a team did well during the iteration. Things that kept you moving. (The Engine)
2. On the post-its given to you, write down what did NOT go well with respect to your iteration. Hindrances caused. (The Anchors)
3. Time limit is 10 minutes each
4. Once we have the feedback, collate it remove redundancy and create themes
5. Then pick up each theme and prioritize it using dot voting (See my blog on “dot voting” to know more)
6. Continue to do what has surfaced as things that have gone well during the iteration (Engine)
7. Pick up the extremely painful anchors and plan to mitigate them

These painful anchors are the ones that need to be removed in order to ensure the speed boat sails swiftly and reaches the island safely

What did we learn from this?

• Surface hopes and concerns
• Motivate people to think
• Agree as a team
• Plan to mitigate early in the cycle

Where can we use this exercise?

• In a “retrospective meeting” to discover what went right or wrong
  
  
• This game helps elicits the key pain points that a team/organization is currently going through. we can use this information to derive the transformation program required for the team/organization

Note: Alternatively you can play "Flight Fly" considering Flight in place of boat. The luggages in place of anchors.