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:
- Form one big team
- Nominate a Starter.
- Nominate a Finisher
- Take 1 minute to plan how to score as many points during next round of play.
- Announce how many points the team will score during the next round of play.
- Play for 2 minutes (following the rules below).
- 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.
One thought on “The Ball Game”