Experience agile project management up close with the Ubongo Flow Game

At House of PM, we are always looking for innovative ways to improve the way we work and empower our teams. Recently, some of our colleagues tested the Ubongo game as a tool to experience and understand the principles of agile project management. We took inspiration from Karl Scotland and Sallyann Freudenberg's Lego Flow Game and applied the game material to the Ubongo game developed by Grzegorz Rejchtmans.

Why games in project management?

Games offer an excellent opportunity to convey complex processes and concepts in a condensed and interactive format. They make it possible to condense temporal experiences and have fun at the same time. In our case, we used the Ubongo Flow Game to simulate and analyse the effects of various project management processes (waterfall, Kanban, Scrum).

The Ubongo Flow Game

The Ubongo Flow Game is a simulation that plays through various roles and process changes in 6-minute rounds. In each round, players complete tasks and measure how many value points the team achieves. The game clearly shows that the way the team works together has a much greater influence on the result than the individual skills of the players.

Materials: For the exercise, we need one Ubongo game per group, task cards, role cards, post-its (for the back-log in the second round), a clock to keep time and a flipchart to record the results.
Gameplay: The game consists of three rounds. A different process (waterfall, Kanban, Scrum) is simulated in each round. The players switch roles and experience the effects of different working methods at first hand.
Results: The simulation showed that teams can work much more efficiently and productively using agile methods such as Kanban and Scrum. This became particularly clear in the third round, when the teams worked in interdisciplinary groups without fixed roles and therefore achieved the highest value of completed tasks.

Learning through play

Through the Ubongo Flow Game, our teams at House of PM learnt in a playful way how agile methods can increase the efficiency and value of a project. It became clear that the way we work together is more important than individual performance. This insight supports our continuous efforts to optimise collaboration and processes in our projects.

Conclusion

The Ubongo Flow Game has shown us how important the way we work together in projects is. Agile methods such as Kanban and Scrum can significantly increase the efficiency and productivity of a team. We look forward to applying and sharing these insights in our future projects.

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