Having a Ball – Variant 5 : Multi-Tasking

V5 – Multi-Tasking

Sticking with the big team scenario above, what if instead of splitting the teams, they decided to toss two balls at a time (one in each hand)? I’ve seen it done. It’s a great way of simulating that doing more than one thing at a time leads to quality issues. The number of dropped balls tends to go up, and the number of balls through the system does not tend to double as each toss takes slightly more ‘care’. to execute.

Origin: The teams came up with this one on their own, although they didn’t really toss the balls. They let gravity satisfy the ‘air time’ requirement by the receiver holding their hands a few inches below the sender’s. The sender then just dropped the balls into the waiting hands below.

Reality Check: Clever? Sure. Scaleable? Not unless you can grow extra arms.

Author: Michael Marchi

Michael Marchi CSM, CSPO, CSP-SM, CSP-PO, RSASP, AHF Management Consultant / Agile Coach & Trainer @ 42 North Unlimited (https://42north.llc) Co-Founder and Board Member @ APLN Chicago (https://aplnchicago.org) Co-Host [here's this agile thing] podcast (https://htat.show)