Choices & Consequences Workshop

 

The Problem

GROWS Skill Stages

Project teams make decisions everyday, usually without enough time and not enough data. You suffer today because poor decisions were made a year ago. All your actions and decisions have side effects—and unintended consequences.

But it’s difficult to understand how your actions and decisions play out over the course of months or years. Many developers only deal with a handful of projects over their whole career. With such slow feedback, how can you best learn what works and what doesn’t?

A Solution

We use a simulation.

Simulating a software development project has many advantages: team members and leaders interact in real time, dealing with real issues, but with immediate feedback on the outcomes—no need to wait months or years for the result.

In the GROWS Method® simulation, you make critical decisions which impact how the team delivers value. Even the smallest decisions impact how the team interacts with customers and leadership, shares information, and deals with difficult interactions. You’ll have the opportunity to explore common development scenarios, including the trade-offs involved in investing in the team itself and delivering the expected value. You’ll gain a greater understanding of the forces involved; the need for investment in team growth, the importance of satisfying both the user and executive communities, and the importance of the real fundamentals of 21st century software development. Please note this is not a process simulation. There are no tickets, no Kanban board.

The Simulation

In our online simulation, you make decisions about which work to accept from the backlog, and make choices when unexpected events arrive. You deliver points based on the roll of a dice. You are scored depending on how many Delivery Points your team delivers. Along the way, you’ll encounter situations and decisions based on real world experiences, and your choices affect your health and outcomes.

As in the real world, your organization’s overall health is composed of several separate factors. In this simulation, your actions and decisions affect overall health in these different areas:

  • DEPLOY—Ability to deliver and deploy. This is influenced by technical practices, CI/CD infrastructure, and so on. This directly affects the size dice you can roll.
  • COLLABORATION—How well the team collaborates within itself and with the rest of the organization.
  • LEARNING—A measure of skill improvement. This includes personal habits and skill acquisition, and ability to embrace and take on novel problems.
  • EXPRIMENTATION—Ability to use Experiments to gather feedback on technical and process-oriented questions and problems.
  • ACTUALS—A measure of your “Grasp of Reality,” or use of actual, high-quality data instead of low-quality proxies.
  • USER—End user/customer happiness and satisfaction.
  • TEAM—Team member happiness and satisfaction.
  • LEADERSHIP—Executive and other leadership happiness and satisfaction.

Curious what the game looks like in practice? Watch this video walkthough.

What You Get

Private workshops:

  1. Pre-activity meeting with the team leader or sponsor
  2. Two rounds of the simulation with your team that we will facilitate and observe (2 hours)
  3. Team debrief to discuss their experience and learnings (1 hour)
  4. Follow up and final debrief with the team leader or sponsor

Public workshops:

  1. Two rounds of the simulation in small teams, randomly assigned. We will observe and facilitate
  2. Group debriefs

Scheduling and Fees

For pricing and to schedule your private workshop, please email us at sales at growsmethod dot com with the dates you have in mind.

We have a limited number of public workshops available, follow us on twitter at @GrowsMethod, Mastodon @growsmenthod@sw-development-is.social or sign up to our mailing list for upcoming announcements.

Curious what The GROWS Method® is all about? Watch this introductory video

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