Level Up Your Teamwork: How We Used a PS4 Game to Master Agile Processes!

Last week I decided to try something new in the company that I work in. Something I’ve been thinking about for months, and finally had the opportunity to turn into reality.

I came up with an experiment where I used a ps4 game to demonstrate the importance of having a process and keep constantly improving it.

The chosen game is called Overcooked 2, and you'll soon understand why.

Overcooked 2 is a chaotic co-op cooking game for 1–4 players in which you must serve a variety of recipes including sushi, pasta, cakes, burgers and burritos to hungry customers in a series of unconventional kitchens. Whether it be a hot air balloon, a magical Wizard’s school or even another planet, you’ll have to be ready for anything. You can work solo or with up to three friends to prepare the orders while overcoming obstacles such as fire, collapsing floors, overbearing waiters and of course, the classic kitchen problem of floating work surfaces.

So, what happens in the game is that you keep receiving orders on the top of the screen and you have to prepare and deliver the maximum amount of orders in a short time. Does it sound familiar somehow?

If we want to bring this into a developer's daily life, we can find lots of similarities, but to resume:

• The orders are like the tasks/user stories we need to deliver.
• The time is what we can consider a cycle/sprint.
• The sequence is the prioritization (kanban style)
• The obstacles (that can take you away for 5s) is like reducing resources from the team (could be that people are out due to sick days or even meetings);

So, what did we do?

The experiment

I invited all the scrum masters in the company (we were 5) to play, and I could even classify them as:

1. Senior with lots of experience in the product( it was just a guy who already knew the game very well and was able to help everyone).
2. Senior but not experienced in the product (he knew a lot about the previous version of the game, but he didn't know about this one specifically)
3. Mid-level (he was already familiar with the game, but not very experienced)
4. Junior (First experience with the game).
5. Scrum master (observing the situations and trying to guide the team to a better process).

I prepared this experience to have 5 phases:

1. Phase 1: Facing Chaos
2. Phase 2: Identifying the problems and taking actions
3. Phase 3: Working in cycles
4. Phase 4: Achieving goals
5. Phase 5: Self-reflection

Phase 1: Facing Chaos

In this phase, I asked the guys to simply play one round without explaining much.It was a disaster (as expected 😂)! They weren't able to ship one single order correctly. Instead, they made mistakes and got a negative score.

The result after the 1st round: Facing chaos

Phase 2: Identifying the problems and taking actions

After Phase 1, we went to Phase 2 and started identifying what went wrong in order to decide what actions we could take to improve our performance. Here is what the team discussed:

• We need to set proper roles(everyone is doing everything at the same time and it's a mess);
• We are not working well together
• We have poor acceptance criteria (It's not clear to everyone what they have to do to deliver their tasks)
• Team members not properly onboarded (The junior guy in the team had no idea on what to do… no guidance);
• Communication issues

And from that, they came up with the following action items:

• We're going to do a planning meeting before we start (Discuss what we have to do in the game scenario before start playing so that it's more clear to everyone what we have to do.)
• Onboarding new members (Explain to the junior how the game works and what everyone has to do in that scenario);
• Communicate all the time;
• Do a discovery sprint;

Phase 3: Working in cycles

So, after having the action items defined, we started Phase 3, where we kept playing, applying the lessons learned, discussing, taking actions to improve the process and playing again.

In the second iteration, after taking the actions discussed previously, we still found issues:

• Priorities not being respected
• Too many "tickets" were being worked in parallel
• Roles were still not being properly assigned
• Communication still has to improve

And some good points were also observed:

• Members were properly onboarded
• Planning before starting was helpful to everyone

The action items decided:

• Define better each one's roles
• Introduce the SM to help the team to focus.

Communication matters!

The team performed really well!

Here are some pictures of the discussions while iterating:

Taking actions and improving the process over the time

So, after playing many cycles, we went to Phase 4, where the team started to achieve the goals. They clearly improved their performance and became more stable, doing fewer mistakes.

Phase 4: Achieving Goals

This phase is just about collecting and highlighting the good results the team made after many iterations. At this moment it’s possible to observe we have achieved something good also in terms of process.

We could see how much better the team performed over time, and this was all the result of a combination of actions that our process brought us.

Once we became better as a team, we moved on to the last phase to discuss our achievements and how did we get there.

Phase 5: Self Reflection

We finished the experiment in this phase, where we discussed the entire activity, and all the lessons learned. Basically, in every iteration, we discussed the errors and took actions, and this is the most important thing if we want to keep improving our processes.

There’s no absolute truth, no unique process that fits for everything. It’s always about discussing, adapting, and improving.

Using Overcooked 2 to demonstrate the importance of a process is very interesting, as the game creates a very chaotic environment and shows, in a short time, how important it is to have a process in order to achieve goals. It shows how easily people can get lost in a team when they’re not well aligned, and the important role that communication plays in reality.

It's a different approach to show how much a well establish process matters to help an organization/team to increase its performance over time.

PS: Some guidelines I prepared to help, in case you're willing to give it a try (and if you do, please share the results 😄, I'm sure they'll be interesting!):

Phase 1: Facing Chaos

The teams are going to play 1 round and discover the chaos

What to expect in general:

• We get requests
• We start playing
• No one knows exactly what to do (no specific roles)

Phase 2: Identifying the problems and taking actions

The players are going to discuss what happened (retro)

What to expect in general:

• We discuss what went wrong (Retro)
• We plan
• We know a bit how the flow works
• We understand better the scenarios (depending on the game phase)
• We understand what we have to do to finish an order(story)
• We assign roles, maybe? (what happens if we do it?)
• What if we leave the next one free to get the next pending activity?
• What if someone finishes someone else’s work? What happens?

Phase 3: Working in cycles

The players are going to play again and again, trying to implement the improvements that should come out of the retro

What to expect in general:

• A process is being established over time
• Retrospective, planning, and coordination (also ownership) should bring better results;

Phase 4: Achieving goals

After playing many times, different cycles, implementing continuous improvement, they're supposed to be delivering more orders, with fewer mistakes, being more effective and making progress.

What to expect in general:

• The team is stable and might have found a good process (Kaizen) -> we should be passing phases faster.
• We know each other better (we know where each of us can perform better working in a team)

Phase 5: Self Reflection

Let’s take notes on the issues that the players found.

How did we solve them?

How can we compare it to our reality?

Some questions we can make:

1. Did you notice a lack of coordination?
2. What happens when you assign roles? (did they think about it?)
3. Is it better if someone is just coordinating without also playing or does it work better if the coordinator is also playing?
4. What happens if someone starts something else new while is already taking care of something (in parallel)?
5. What happens when the next person free starts the next order?
6. Should we start working on a new order while one is currently in progress?
7. Is it better if everyone is focusing together on finishing the same order? Or is it better if we split the focus?
8. Did someone feel more comfortable doing one specific task only, or did everyone felt ok with doing a bit of everything? How did they perform better overall?