Prune the Product Tree Gets Political 

Transforming Enterprise Collaboration Through Expertise Communities

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It's been a busy month in cyberspace for Innovation Games, especially in the French-speaking parts of the world. Here are a few of the most interesting posts from Hanoi, to Paris, to the U.S.A.

Innovation Games en Francais
In mid-April, Innovation Games were featured on the program of SFEIR's second Agile Laboratory: The monthly events are designed to help the French consulting company's team to learn, exchange ideas and continuously improve. The day-long session began with a high-level overview of the games and their advantages. Nicholas Monday, the author of the post, comments that Innovation Games, for him, have the following advantages:

• They facilitate connections between team members and therefore increase cooperation.
• They can help focus participants' attention by removing them from their daily tasks.
• The visual nature of the games helps you easily remember key messages
• The act of playing blurs any hierarchies in the group that may have tarnished any creative potential.  

The Innovation Games portion of the day concluded with an interesting Buy a Feature session on the marketable features of future cars and a Speed Boat session where participants determined the subject of the game. To read the complete post (and check up on my translation skills), click here. 

Flirting with Buy a Feature in Hanoi

Aymeric Libeau, CIO and VP of Infrastructure and R&D for Pentalog, an offshoring company, recently blogged about his intent to use  Buy a Feature during the Project Manager Camp held for the Pentalog team in Hanoi, Vietnam. The camps typically last a full day and cover such topics as organization, quality, customer relations, etc. Libeau's goals for improving the camps include encouraging more interactivity-a good thing, right?  

He writes, "We are going to use an approach that I saw in an Agile seminar, called Innovation Game:  Buy a Feature. Every participant receives an amount of money in a fictitious currency, 'Penta-Euro,' for instance. Instead of the seminar leader choosing a random subject, the participants are the ones who form groups in order to buy the topics they are interested in. This collaboration is specific to the Agile method." Sounds like Libeau is taking a step in the right direction toward increasing interaction. Read the complete post here. 

Vive le Speed Boat!

Speed Boat is often adapted by agile teams for retrospectives (see Jason Tanner's take here), and with good reason. Retrospectives can often be stale, dry activities, especially if the team is distributed. In this blog post, Antoine, an agile consultant from France, writes about how he is often looking for new ways to conduct retrospectives with his team. Recently, after receiving Luke's book, he decided to use Speed Boat for the retrospective on his team's recent sprint. They drew a boat on large paper, dubbed the boat the team, and then they settled in and posted the "anchors" that were holding them back from success. After the anchors posted, Antoine guided the team through discussion of what theydiscovered. To read more, click here.   

Meanwhile, across the pond in Bellevue, WA, Steve Hamilton

Imprev's Speed Boat game in progress.

led the product development team for Imprev (an ASP serving the real estate industry) through a team-focused retrospective using Speed Boat. The Flash Designer drew a boat on the white board and the team added anchors representing items that needed to be worked on by the group. Hamilton was pleased and surprised by results-especially, since the team wiki was a top item for improvement. He writes, "I had no idea the team cared about our wiki nor that they had specific ideas to improve it AND would pick it as the top thing to fix in our retrospective." To read Steve's complete post, click here.