Yesterday we piloted the new DevOpsImprovement game.
Many DevOps teams (and that includes the PO) are struggling with balancing between Development work, operational tasks and improvements. Depending on the organisational context and the team members, there often is a focus on one of the three types of work. In the Dev, Ops & Improvement game teams experience the benefit of improving your way of working and balancing between short term and long-term benefits. In the game teams experience that often the way to being proactive and innovative is by reducing the time spent on operational task by sufficient improvements like automation, CI/CD and developing team skills. The goal of this interactive card game is to have a maximum of business value in a sustainable way without ignoring operational responsibilities and creating technical dept.
During the agile guild meeting at Valori we held the first trial run. We made some improvements and will present the game at the NN Agile day, later this month. The participants were enthusiastic: ” it gives examples on how certain improvements can benefit the organisation”, “the events are really recognisable, we have them as well”, “it triggers discussion between teams” and “since it can be done in an hour, I can easily do it during retrospective or e.g. at a lunch session”.
Derk-Jan de Grood 