The MUTIC Game is a LeSS Simulation Game, i.e. multiple teams are formed to play it. It helps players to understand some of the challenges they are going to face in a LeSS adoption. The simulation requires only very simple playing materials - A4 / Letter paper, Post-Its, pair of scissors and downloadable instructions - stuff available in any company I guess.

The game helps players to learn what it means to deliver value to the customer in a LeSS setup (multi-team Scrum) at the system or feature level. Players experience the challenges of integrating the results of and coordination with multiple teams across multiple LeSS sprints. The also learn ways how to coordinate between and integrate results of multiple teams in a LeSS sprint. In addition players will share their takeaways and can use them to improve the performance of their real-life teams.

During the Open Space, we presented and explained the simulation concept and had the group play one single round of the game, in order for them to get some experience. Before, during and after playing this round we anwered all kinds of questions and shared our insights from facilitating this game in 5 SUG session in Karlsruhe, Mannheim, Heilbronn, München and Bern so far.

One of the main take aways of facilitating the MUTIC game is, that this simulation not only allows to experience the challenges of integration and coordination of multiple Scrum teams, but also showcases the struggles of delivering value at the system (or feature) level. Everytime we played this simulation in the past, the players, which were predominantly users of Scrum or Scrum Master / Agile Coaches, fell for the same traps that most organisations fall into at the beginning (and some never get out!), when trying to adopt incremental delivery of value with every sprint - they deliver components rather than customer value. And guess what, we experienced the same phenomena during our Open Space session.

We spent about 15 minutes at the end to carefully and in detail discuss the findings of the participants and shared our experience from the earlier simulations.

The simulation instructions and material can be downloaded from http://bit.ly/TheLeSSMuticGame (valid until 11/30/2019)