Resource Management
Training Exercises and Resources

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.

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.

This is a template for a creativity exercise centred on making monsters. It can be used for kids and adults depending on how you bias it and setup the exercise.

You can consider assigning the task to groups for an exercise on teamwork, teambuilding and management or run it individually for focus on creativity.

Ideally, you should run this exercise as a competition between participants to keep it fun and focused.

This is an entertaining and educational exercise for building teams and getting people to work together towards a common objective. You can explore a whole lot of topics on teamwork, leadership, communication skills and problem solving. Unlike many team building games that are competitive, this exercise is cooperative despite having two different teams assigned with different tasks. As a result, the setup allows people to have a good time while also learning how to work with each other towards a common objective. The exercise can be run just in theory as well, but it is best if it is actually implemented. For that, you would need to access an open area such as a park with a specific layout so it does not require planning and preparation on your side.

This is an exercise similar to the popular team building exercise on handling toxic waste. The major difference here is that participants need to handle a glass of water and don’t spill it while carrying it from one location to another.

The exercise is ideal for teamwork, leadership and resource management. The competitive atmosphere leads to rapid decision making, activity coordination, and novel ways to compromise and get the task done.

In this team building exercise, the group must work together to handle toxic waste symbolised by an object. Many areas can be explored in this exercise including leadership, problem solving, teamwork, communication skills and attention to detail. You can easily adjust the difficulty level of this exercise by varying the type of equipment used or changing a number of parameters as described in the Variations section below.

This is a useful exercise that helps delegates to quickly come up with a plan to respond to a crisis. In today’s dynamic world, crisis management is crucial. Risk prediction and risk management is vital for companies. This exercise turns crisis management into a game, providing a fun and educational environment to learn about this important management activity.

When solving problems, it is sometimes easy to dismiss new ideas straight away by worrying about lack of resources or lack of time. A new idea is usually very fragile and cannot stand much scrutiny. Thinking of limitations can seriously stop you from coming up with novel ideas as you may kill them off before they have a chance to prosper.

To avoid this, a useful technique is to artificially eliminate these resource limitations and instead freely think about the long-term benefits of a given idea.

This exercise helps the delegates to examine our changing world and provides an opportunity to discuss what it means for future. You can use this as part of a change management course or to run it for staff who are subjected to a change management programme.