Any person involved in technology should, from time to time, follow some meetups. And SkillsMatter is a very good place to find some of them. Tonight I went to Kanban Pizza, it was not what I expected (and maybe I could have chosen better, because at the same time there was one meetup of London Microservice User Group and one on Project Management), but it was nice.
The meetup was all about this exercise that apparently is very famous. It is about baking some (not real) pizzas made of paper: you have one marker, two scissors, yellow papers for cutting the shape of a slice of pizza, white post-it to shape with the shape of mushrooms, orange post it to cut as an egg, and other things like that. There were four rounds of the games, with some different rules.
First round was the caos: you had to bake as many slices as possible, with the following rules: one slice of pizza (so, one piece of yellow paper) should be coloured with red (the sauce), it needed three mushrooms and an egg and you had to keep the slice in a (fake) oven for 30 to 45 seconds. Only at the end the organiser told us that there was a final constraint: things shaped but not used were considered as wasted and they were subtracting points. First round we ended at 16 points.
Second round we introduced workplaces, so areas of table dedicated to specific tasks or to store stuffs. And we took one of the previously backed slice as our Definition Of Done. All the previous rules were kept. We did our best performance in this round, with 64 points.
Third round we introduced another process, another type of pizza with a different preparation. Moreover, we introduced orders and delivery: the organiser was delivering orders and we had to pick them and complete them, and deliver them in another table, with a limited capacity in transportation. In this round we decreased a lot our productivity, and we got 11 points.
Fourth round was basically the same, but between the last two rounds we had the possibility to do a retrospective of 5 minutes. Anyway we did our worst performance in this round and we achieved a final score of -28.
The other table was more coherent, they did very bad at the first three rounds, but the fourth was better than the third, cause they established an orchestrator for their work, while for us we had a problem because two people at the third round brought lot of orders on the table (too much work in progress!!!) and most of us lost the sense of what was happening, while for the fourth round we simply took a too much big order and the time finished when we were completing it.
After a small final discussion on kanban and agile in general, we finished the meetup.
According to timings I think I could follow the next ones.
Stay tuned!
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