The Ball Game

I attended my Certified Scrum Master training held by Tobias Mayer and Mike Sutton in September 2008. This was a brilliant course that had a practical element built in to help us learn. One of the practical elements was a game called "The ball game".

I have taken this from Mike Sutton’s Blog at Agile-Blogs. It is a great game and well worth trying with your team.

Timing: 20 minutes.
Ingredients:

• People and space
• about 30 balls (ping pong balls will do )
• Stop watch
• Flip chart to write down scores.

Directions:

1. Form one big team
2. Nominate a Starter.
3. Nominate a Finisher
4. Take 1 minute to plan how to score as many points during next round of play.
5. Announce how many points the team will score during the next round of play.
6. Play for 2 minutes (following the rules below).
7. Repeat steps 1 to 6 , five times.

Rules:

• Ball must have air time (a throw)
• A player cannot pass to anyone directly beside or in front
• Player can have only ONE ball in possession at a time
• Dropped balls are discarded and returned to the container
• Ball must go round all players and returned to the container to score a point.

Learning Points:

• Demonstrate self organisation and iterative working.
• Illustrate the ‘responding to change’ power of working in a highly collaborative and agile way.
• Demonstrate the power of inspection and adaption and continuous improvement.

Devised By:  Boris Gloger

Taught to me by: Tobias Mayer + Mike Sutton

The Ball Game as played at the 2008 Fall Scrum Gathering in Stockholm.