Courses

Half a Day of Crazy Fun and Skills Acquisition

And no elephants ever get hurt!

 

This world-famous workshop is licensed free of charge to many teachers around the globe, it is that important that everyone learns these skills. However, the greatest value comes in taking it from the inimitable originator!

 

The active part of this workshop is developing a seemingly very small and simple spreadsheet or program to calculate prices for a product. There is nothing particularly hard about this assignment, it is an ordinary business problem cast into an ordinary spreadsheet. That is not the point of the workshop.

 

The learning in this workshop is how to slice that little problem into 15-20 growth stages, which reduce risk, deliver value, produce income, provide market learning points, and allow pivoting the business all with the smallest energy.

 

After reviewing the problem and practicing in discussion groups how to do this, the end of the workshop is a 40-minute exercise in five 8-minute rounds, where teams must demo their results to other teams at the end of each round. A very noisy, energetic, frustrating activity that highlights both the gains and the tensions in working in small increments.

 

The activity teaches how to slice business initiatives, whether marketing or product, into thin enough pieces to fit into any size of timebox or sprint, and why that is beneficial.

 

If programmers are available, they can use their programming environments instead of the spreadsheet, so that they learn why and how to work in carpaccio-thin slices on their programming problems. Paired with a business person, the two see both the technical aspects and the business aspects of the problem. Whether pure business or business with programming, all of the slicing decisions are based on the business situation, not the technology aspects.

 

This is an intense exercise that shows business-side and development-side people both, how to work in the fine-grained style needed for modern agile development.

 

This workshop pairs well with the Hexagonal Architecture workshop to make a full day's training.

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