Kanban Quest is a role playing game that offers trainers and coaches infinite possibilities to model and simulate any knowledge work situation they can imagine. It’s a game of imagination and experimentation, in which players can explore the consequences of practices and policies that might be risky in real life, but all experiments are safe to fail in Kanban Quest.
The game includes a game board on which a team models their initial process, and work items to be completed. Players create characters to do the work, and those characters learn and grow in the process of the game. Various events present challenges to the team as they strive to evolve the best solution solve issues of dependencies, staff liquidity, upstream starvation, shared services, flaky infrastructure, incorporating cost of delay decision-making, and many other challenges and opportunities that we see in real life.
Game scenarios may be simple, giving the team a chance to experience and practice solving one type of problem, like finding a bottleneck and then optimising flow. Or a team may simulate the experience of gradually incorporating lean practices into their Scrum-based system. More complex simulations can involve optimising multi-team, end-to-end value delivery in a game that can span hours or even days of gameplay, while simple simulations can be played out in an hour or less.
Kanban Quest is a toolkit, limited only by the imagination of the players.