I played the Business Value game (BVG)

Last night I finally played the Business Value Game V2 at Okiwi

I still remember the day I was doing some agile coaching with Vera, Pascal, Johan at a large financial client. They had a large backlog that they had trouble prioritizing.
During one of these meetings Vera said to me, we need to create a game to help people understanding Business Value. It felt so right I was surprised nobody thought about it earlier.

At Agile 2008 I played a pre-beta version of BVG led by Pascal & Portia.

This BVG was a try out for Agile Tour Bordeaux.I’m very happy Fredericdid a try out.
1) I think the best sessions at conferences have been dry runned the week before.
2) I can’t go to BVG at AGTB. (Like it has been the last 2 years)

As with all the games that Pascal, Vera and Portia make, the game has a creative commons licence. Also like all their games that you can download, when you download the game, you have everything to play

(Although I tried to copy that for my leadership game, the fact I use tons of lego can’t of makes that impossible. ==> there is a lesson here for game designers…)

One of the critis about the XPand the BV game, is that they contain too much.
And yet after the game was over, the only remarks Frederic got was new idea on how to make it even more complex.
A few examples:
-have a client that runs away unexpectly
(Now you know when he will walk away
– You have income but you don’t have costs. As Frederic said you are not really encouraged to deliver the first two sprints. In real life, when you deliver a project to your customer, it changes your cashflow. Adding a cost to each sprint would encourage people to deliver fast.
Although this is my own idea and I clearly like to add that to the game to make it more realistic. (This game is aimed at either business people or developers that want to understand more about doing business) I also think that teaching games should be kept as simple as possible.

What puzzles me:

In one of the later iterations there is a story that says if you deliver this story the framework improvement is +1 (instead of +2)
It’s not clear if implementing this moves from +2 to +1. If you had +2 and now another 1 added.
Why would I implement that story when I know my improvements go down?

I remember that after playing the beta version I was very confused about what I had learned. That feeling I had not yesterday.
When I have money for each demand I can clearly see how to create BV.

My biggest challenge is that most of my clients don’t know about the amount of money they will make for each demand.
(Neither did that client when the game was invented, but the client sales people thoughted they knew.)

ROTI of my evening: 4