Game Spotlight: Transforming Speed Boat

Game Spotlight: Transforming Speed Boat

The metaphor is often one of the most powerful drivers behind a successful visual collaboration game, and we’re always excited to see the innovative ways the Innovation Games community are adapting the games and game metaphors to meet their needs. Here’s a collection of blog posts on how Speed Boat, in particular, has been transformed to help people do real work around the world.

The Climbing Game

Gojko Adzic, founder of Neuri ltd., a UK-based software consultancy, recently wrote about how he adapted our Speed Boat game for a Specification by Example workshop in Australia. Gojko wanted to discover what his workshop participants knew about the benefits and challenges of Specification by Example at the workshop’s outset, in essence using Speed Boat to measure knowledge levels. Instead of an image of a boat, Gojko used the metaphor of climbing a mountain. In his words, “a long, challenging and exhausting process with some interesting views along the way, similar to implementing a process change in a software firm.” The game was a success, enabling Gojko to adjust the workshop schedule “to fit individual needs.” Click here to read more about his game design.

Speed Boat for Retrospectives

CARA Lyon, an agile group in Lyon, France, recently used Speed Boat to run a retrospective on the group’s activities since the group’s founding. Franck Depierre writes in his blog that, “Romain Couturier [one of the 20+ trained Innovation Games Facilitators in France] led the retrospective and proposed the Speed Boat game to achieve it.” Depierre continues, “the boat was our local organization, CARA Lyon. We started to display anchors, which slowed down the speed of our boat. Soon, we understood we didn’t know where we were coming from and where we were going to.” To see a slide show of the game in action and read more, click here.

L’amélioration avec un Speed Boat

Another Innovation Games Trained Facilitator in France, Alexandre Boutin, writes about his experience with Speed Boat to evaluate a team’s adaption of Agile principles and whether the project had been complete in full Agile mode. Alexandre posts a photo of the finished boat, which includes images of himself (the project coach) driving the boat and whales, in addition to traditional anchors. Check out his post here (in French) and the team’s finished Speed Boat.

Speed Boat Makes Waves in Australia and Brazil

Atlassian‘s Nicolas Muldoon recently recommended using Speed Boat (and other Innovation Games) in his talk, “Be the Change You Seek — Kickstart Innovation” at Agile Australia 2011. According to Zane Gambasian’s blog post, Nicolas offered up Innovation Games as a way to answer the question “What do you do when you want innovation, but you need to prove you need some time to get work on them?” Click here to read Zane’s complete post or check out Nicolas’s slides here.

Both Speed Boat and Product Box are featured in this post on a Brazilian website, Ogerente Canais, as effective tools for agile project management. According to the post, adopting Innovation Games to identify customer needs and gather requirements allows greater interaction between team members, more active participation of key stakeholders in the project and improved communication and motivation for the team.