Fear of decision making often leads teams to exhibit one or more of the dysfunctional symptoms of Agile ADHD. This tutorial will help agile practitioners overcome the fear of decision making by first embracing that there are no right or wrong decisions. Agile development is ultimately driven by a series of decisions, all of which are made in the face of uncertainty. Tutorial participants will take away principles and practices that enable their team to embrace uncertainty and be proactive in making better decisions at the most responsible moment.

To make lasting changes, we need to visualise the situation, understand the system, know how to improve it and work together. The Theory of Constraints tells us how to do all that.

In this game, we apply the “Five Focusing Steps” process improvement method from ToC. Step by step we use Agile, Lean and Real Options techniques to make our “work” more fun and productive.

After the simulation game, you’ll be able to apply these techniques to your work.

You’ll be able to use the open source “Bottleneck Game” to share these techniques with others.

Max. 60 players

Bob Scoble Esq. and Ted “Theodore” Logan are about to embark on a new technology start-up venture when a mystical figure with a fondness for beagles and the Galapagos Islands appears before them, promising great prospects for their new business if they first agree to accompany him on a unique adventure. They accept. Spotting a theme common across the many amazing conversations they have subsequently, Bob and Ted decide to follow the XP principle of doing extreme amounts of the practices that work: they implement the world’s first completely Darwinian complex systems risk management program.

For almost a decade our community has claimed that agile is a risk-driven approach. Yet there is very little published material on agile risk management. Traditional risk management is based on avoidance of external variations. While, traditional project scheduling treats tasks homogeneously from a risk perspective. Lean pull systems and Real Options Theory provide new means to manage overall business risk in technology projects. This tutorial describes 3 techniques that evolved in the kanban community that increase sophistication of risk management and provide improved business agility.