- Most of us cling to the notion
that if we could just focus on our work
in a quiet office all by ourselves,
we'd be much more productive.
The problem is is that you're actually right
but most organizations aren't just one individual.
You as an individual probably would be much more productive
just working on your own tasks
but as a team overall, you'd actually be less productive.
You probably don't believe me
and that's why I love the penny game.
To start the game,
you'll arrange several people around a table.
These people represent members of a team
or even different functional areas.
Each team member has their own batch of work.
To keep things simple, this work is just to flip pennies.
Each team member flips pennies two at a time
then passes them to a coworker.
To monitor the team's progress,
you can record how long it takes each person
to finish their work
and how long it takes for the customer
to get their first glance of the product
and when it's finished,
I usually run the penny game in three rounds.
For this first round,
I have each person flip all 10 pennies.
Remember that this is how most people prefer to work.
They can just focus on all 10 pennies and when they're done,
they can hand it off to the next person.
This is the equivalent of sitting in your office all day
and focusing just on your own work.
You can see that each person is pretty productive.
They're finishing their big batches around 10 seconds
but the customer doesn't get their product until 52 seconds.
For the second round,
the team creates two batches of five pennies.
In this smaller batch,
their coworkers can start working much more quickly.
Each team member doesn't have to wait for the full handoff.
They can start to work
as soon as they receive their first batch.
So you can see this is making each individual team member
much less productive.
The smaller batches are slowing down each person.
So now everyone is hovering around 12 seconds
but the customer gets their first batch of work
in only 28 seconds and then the team finishes in 34 seconds.
For the third round,
they break their work down into five batches of two pennies
so we're getting rid of these big handoffs
and keeping the team from multitasking.
Everyone is focused on their own two pennies.
It took each team member around 14 seconds
to complete the work,
four seconds longer than the batch of 10
but the customer gets to see the work dramatically faster
receiving the first glimpse in only 11 seconds
and the entire product in 23 seconds,
half the time of the first round.
During the first round
when people could focus on the entire batch,
they were individually more productive
but the customer didn't receive the work until much later
so the overall team productivity was quite low.
When the work was broken down into smaller batches,
each team member took longer to finish their own work
but the team delivered the product in half the time.
So if you're a manager,
seeing this dip in individual productivity
can be a real challenge
when starting to work as an Agile team
but the penny game shows
that while individual productivity decreases,
the overall productivity of the whole team will increase
and the customer will get their product much more quickly.
The most productive way to work as an Agile team
is by moving around small batches of work
and eliminating handoffs
even if your own productivity decreases.