Agile Ship Building in Bristol
10 Nov 2017A workshop for the WIP-curious…
I recently went to Agile in the City Bristol. It’s a 3-day conference about all things Agile. I learned a bunch and completely overfilled my brain with inspiring information. (About which another blog post soon…)
Whilst there, I also had the opportunity to run the Ship Building workshop with my fellow Scrum Master, Martyn Frank. Our workshop is based on a format from Dr Klaus Leopold, which you can watch here. We’ve taken the workshop and altered it a bit, extended and tweaked, and generally made it our own.
… sounds awesome!
It is! It’s a fun workshop that teaches a whole bunch of concepts that we use in Agile software development… For example:
- Push vs Pull systems
- Stable vs Unstable systems
- Resource efficiency, Flow efficiency and slack time
- WIP and WIP limits
- Throughput and value delivery
- Lead time, estimation and forecasting
- Little’s Law
- Bottlenecks and the Theory of Constraints
- Lean commitment
- Systems Thinking
It consists of a pair of experiments in which we attempt to build as many ships as possible under two sets of working policies. Metrics from the two experiments are compared to discover insights and draw various conclusions. Also, some thought experiments are run to examine what would happen under different conditions, or with different changes to the processes.
And everyone gets their hands covered in felt-tip pen ink!
The workshop picked up a bit of interest from delegates at the conference who were keen to take it away and run it themselves. If you’re interested, you can find the instructions on how to run it, the materials you’ll need, and some of the questions that arise from the experiments, in the PDF linked below.