Since me and Danilo started presenting the Lean Lego game in 2008, a lot of people have been asking for information about how to run the workshop by themselves, in their companies, etc.. During this time, we have created a presenter pack, which we happily distribute to anyone who wants to use the material for non-commercial purposes.

To make this information more accessible and easy to find, we have created a page for the game, where you can find more information about it, and how to get in touch with us and get the material you need.

Here you go: Lean Lego Game

Enjoy!

I’ve been for the past two weeks in Brazil, and during this trip I’ve had the opportunity to participate in the 2nd Latin American Conference on Agile Methodologies, Agiles 2009, which was also being sponsored by ThougtWorks.

The conference itself was great, with a really good attendance (around 500 people), including students and professionals from different south-american countries and lots of good speakers, including Brian Merick and Diana Larsen.

I had a presentation on the first morning, titled “Is Agile The New Waterfall ?”, which tried to propose a discussion about how the (unfortunately) de facto way of agile adoption might influence negatively the future of the movement. Gladly, the presentation went really well, with a fully packed room, lots of questions and good feedback from the audience.

ThoughtWorks also used the opportunity to announce the opening of a brazilian office in Porto Alegre, which was done at the ending of a very well received keynote from Roy, which talked about the industry, his views on South America and also about the company and its purpose.

We had a great time overall, and the organizers should be congratulated for the effort of making this event possible, specially when all the people behind it were working as volunteers.

In case you are curious, you can find pictures from the event here.

Last month me and Danilo presented an extended version of the Lego Lean Game at XP2009 in Sardinia, Italy.

This was the first time we tried this version, and it can be considered a success, with good feedback and some people asking information to run the workshop within their companies/classes.

You can find more information about how it went on this post Danilo wrote, and the slides are also available here (if you like to see how it went, pics are here). As he said, we prepared a package with all the material needed to run the workshop, so feel free to ask us for it if you have participated and are interested in doing it : )

Deviating a little bit from the agile topics, Im writing this post to tell a little story about my relationship with a certain british bank, and how well they use IT for the client’s benefit.

I dont want to tell the bank’s name, because the purpose is not to create bad advertising or something like that, so for the moment I will just call this institution the bank of the citi.

So, beginning the story, last month I was surprised by having been charged interests in my credit card bill, despite having the feeling that I had payed in the right day. I sent my bank a message, which was replied:

our payment due date was 27th October 2008 and your payment was made on the 29th October 2008. Because the payment was late you have been charged the late fee and the interest.

Ok, but I still thought I’d payed in the right day, so I checked my account info and verified it. Second message to the bank of the citi:

my account info show the transaction was made on the 27th.

27/10 TRANSFER 538813

Why it is just considered in the 29th?

And then comes the surprise (in form of a reply):

When making a debit card payment to your credit card the timescales are up to two working days for it to clear onto your account.
If you require anything else please don’t hesitate to contact me again.

Then I thought: What?? And kept trying to understand how possibly it could take 2 working days to transfer some money electronically to the same bank.

Since I was in a good mood and the attendant had offered me his help, I decided to send another message:

I think the only question I have is how come it takes 2 days to do an electronic transfer, but probably it won’t solve my problem.

And here comes the answer:

It takes two working days for a debit card payment to clear onto accounts as it has to go through clearing and then be allocated to the correct account.

Oh, now I understand… It’s not a simple operation, like transfer the money. You actually have to subtract the money from one account, clear it (whatever this means), and then transfer it to the other one.

For some days after this whole conversation occurred, I tried to think how someone managed to build some software that needs 2 working days to perform one operation.

I thought that maybe there’s one batch job that gets the money from my account (which runs at midnight at D+1) and another one that gets this money and adds it to the other account (midnight at D+2), or  both operations happen at D+1, but then they need 24 hours to verify if the transaction was correctly performed, or there’s actually a person that goes to the safe where my account is, counts the money, and then goes to some other building where the bank account is, opens the safe and stores the money there… actually, no, this would be much faster than 2 days.