Planning
Training Exercises and Resources

Suppose you want to run an exercise in your course and want to divide your class into groups of 4. That is rather straight forward to do for small groups. Now, suppose you want to run another exercise and you want to mix up the groups. Is there a way to do this efficiently and systematically? We have developed a tool called Clock Buddies Random Group Generator to facilitate this process. The tool makes a series of personalised handouts (in the shape of discs) and students can use them to look up who they need to go with quickly.

In addition to the handouts given to the students, as a trainer or teacher, you can also use the same tool to generate all possible unique group combinations and have it as a reference. This helps you have an overall view of group configurations and when to switch from one combination to another. We call this the Group Layout View. To create them, you can use the “Generate Group Layouts” feature in the group generator tool. Let’s go through some examples to illustrate what the tool can do for you.

This is a useful exercise in demonstrating the difference between Agile and traditional development environments such as waterfall. It can also help explore concepts such as silo mentality, where each department or team focuses only on their own issues and problems.

The exercise helps teams analyse their performance based on two approaches while going through a fun activity. You can use the comparison and lead them with a discussion on the benefits of Agile practices and how it can help them in practice.

In Traditional methods, specific work is assigned to specific workers with a single role and speciality. In Agile methods, the whole team must take care of the whole work. The hallmarks are communication among team members and iteration in respect with quality control and process improvement as the team moves forward with completing the project.

Consider debriefing the delegates on both Traditional and Agile methods before going through this exercise.

These days, we want to multitask everything and all at once. Sometimes, when the work is routine, multitasking improves performance; for example, when you are cooking something you already know. Most often though, it tends to reduce performance.

This exercise elegantly demonstrates how multitasking can be detrimental. It is a simple exercise with two rounds where one round is designed with multitasking where delegates have to switch between different tasks. In the other round, task are approached in sequence. Delegates can then compare their performance across the two rounds.

This exercise is ideal for teams, teaching productivity and time management. It is also useful for project management, agile methods and task management.

You are a subject expert. You are in the process of designing a face-to-face interactive course and wonder how to offer it to the market. A primary question you may ask yourself is how to decide the timing:

• How long should be the course?
• When should you run the course?
• How should you plan the breaks?
• When should you start or finish the course?

We know that answering such questions can depend on the domain, the target market and the local customs. In any case, getting to know what the training community thinks about such areas can be thought provoking, at least to know if your intuition about an answer is correct.

To find out what the training community thinks, we sent a survey and collected replies from our subscribers. In this article, we will present the data, followed by analysis of what this data suggests along with our own observations when running courses.

This is a classic exercise on team building. It is fun to participate in this exercise and yet it is quite powerful in bringing a team together while teaching communication, leadership and problem solving.

Delegates are asked to pour water into a pipe to raise a ping pong ball inside and therefore to get it out. The pipe is leaky though and there is a challenge on how fast they can get the water into the pipe without losing it through the holes. This requires cooperation, planning, delegation and resource management.

This exercise is ideal for team building and can be used for any age. Several variations are provided at the end to increase the difficulty of the task as you see fit.

The purpose of icebreakers is to bring people together, familiarise them with each other, put them into the zone and basically break the ice as the name suggests. The purpose of team building activities is to bring the teams together, get them to go through a shared experience, solve problems, make decisions, manage limited resources and usually work against time. To address both, you can take advantage of great educational and entertaining tools in the form of board games.

You can use board games for many training purposes. Some games last long which help to bring a team together and some can be quite short which could be ideal to break the ice. There are cooperative games, competitive games, or even games that don’t have a winner, but just one big loser! Some games abstract down the real world in such imaginative ways that become incredibly rewarding to experience. As such board games are great if you want to create a memorable event which is also educational as this is what many traditional team building games aim to achieve.

In this comprehensive article, you will be introduced to several hand-picked board games that you can use in a training environment to address a variety of topics.

Agile project management was popularised by the tech industry and has its roots in Japanese companies such as Toyota, Honda and Fuji. There are many who think agile development can lead to efficient project management and as a result it remains a hot topic. The Scrum framework was then developed based on that in the 90s and has since gained momentum in a variety of technology and engineering companies.

The exercise shown here is a great tool to quickly and elegantly show what Scrum project management is about. Scrum has many amusing and somewhat unusual jargon, such as sprint, backlog, daily scrum, scrum master and so on. This engaging exercise can help you familiarise delegates with these jargons and make it easier to remember them.

Before going through the details of the exercise, here is a quick intro to Scrum. It is highly recommended that you familiarise yourself with the methodology using numerous guides that are available online. The overall aim of scrum is to indicate clearly what needs to be done, by whom it should be done and how this information should be updated periodically to make sure the whole team stays up-to-date, or ‘agile’ so to speak. These are the main components of scrum:

• Product Owner. This is a person in charge who has the authority to say what goes into the final product. This is formulated based on the end user’s interest.
• Backlog. This is a prioritised list of tasks and requirements for the final product. The product owner oversees this list.
• Sprint. A team must complete tasks from the backlog with a certain timeframe which is known as sprint. Typically, this is about two weeks, but it depends on the team’s needs.
• Daily Scrum. This is a daily meeting of teams to give progress updates. It is typically held in the same location, at the same time, time-boxed to 15 minutes and carried out while standing (it is also called Daily Stand-Ups).
• Retrospective. Each sprint is finalised with a review session to see what needs to be improved for the next sprint.

In this exercise, teams compete to retrieve a highly dangerous nuclear waste. There are three distinct roles based on the scrum framework. Teams score points for their performance and the winning team is acknowledged.

Back in 2013 we released a software tool on our website called Clock Buddies. Clock Buddies refers to a traditional tool used to pair people up in a classroom setting. Each person was given a blank sheet resembling the face of a clock. Students then filled this in with their names. The clocks would then allow the teacher to group the students quickly by simply calling out a given hour; for example, the teacher would say, “pair up with your buddy at 3 o’clock”. Students would then look at their clock faces, find the name of the person written at 3 o’clock and pair up with him.

In this team building exercise, delegates work together to complete a task. It requires concentration, planning and fast execution. Here, the decisions made by one team can affect the performance of another so planning has to be as dynamic as the changing environment. This exercise is ideal to train people on quick decision making, leadership, persuasion skills and team work.

Is there such a thing as a good career or a bad career? Is there such a thing as a good hobby or a bad hobby? Such choices are often very personal so can we really say what is good for people and what is bad? Probably not, but we all know that these days a lot of people desire “success”. It seems that with success comes a lot of happiness affecting all areas of life. It is not the only way to gain happiness but it certainly can lead to it. Success is not always about careers or jobs; it can be about anything in a person’s life; it could be success in raising good children, success in gardening, success in being a likable person, success in being the first to achieve a feat, success in being good at a given skill, success in being useful to society or simply success in being happy and getting the most from life.

With the concept of success and happiness comes options and choices. We all need to make decisions about what careers to get into, what hobbies to engage in and what to spend our finite time on. The decision means that, yes there is such a thing as a good or bad choice that can in the long run influence your happiness.

Some people seem to excel at this. They make all the right choices and it seems that the world goes out of its way to accommodate their desires. How come they succeed so well? Perhaps on further examination we can discover the underlying principles that help one make good choices.

As an example, let’s consider an episode in the life of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s. No one can dispute that he had an extraordinary life so far and with his universality and fame, it is certainly worth examining his life to see how his decisions and interests has shaped his life.