Organize a Lean Game session - Complete guide

In this guide, we will guide you through creating your first Lean Game, and provide links to more other articles if you want to dive deeper into specific topics.

First, for a general overview of the game and its benefits, you can read our article What is the Lean Game.

You can use our power point presentation that was developed to work with the default template:

1. Choose a scenario and template

We have developed several templates, that you may choose depending on the number of expected players, their current skills level and the time available.

For the Lean Game, we propose 2 main scenarios:

Cars and Trucks

It represents a workshop painting cars and trucks, with 4 players per team: Yellow, Grey, Blue, Quality & Rework.

Noddy and Dog

It represents a workshop painting Puppet (inspired by Noddy) and Dog toys. It is a bit more complex, with 7 stations/players per team, based on the shape of the paint: Circle, Square Triangle, Vertical Bar, Horizontal Bar, Quality and Rework.

Improvements management

Each of these two scenarios is available in two versions:

1. Default, were improvements are already pre-implemented in the scenario. Students will not be able to decide which improvement
2. Players improvements, where players can decide which improvement to implement round after round.

Letting players decide and implement improvements will allow them to understand better the impact of each of them. But it will also take more time. So you may decide based on the time available and the skills of players.

2. Determine the number of teams

In the Lean Game, each station can only be played by a single player. So for example if you expect 20 players/students, with the Default template (4 stations), you should create 5 teams.

If a player is missing or if you don't have the exact number of players to fill a round number of teams, no worries. The platform recognizes automatically when a role is not being played and the computer takes over automatically.

If you have extra players, you can also let them join a game as "Observer". They will be able to visualize the flow of products, see what is happening at each station and then make recommendations on how we could improve.

3. Explain the rules to the participants

When joining a game, players will automatically see some onboarding slides, to give them instructions tailored to their role.

Before that, you can introduce the game by using our slides, that you can download at the top of this article. We also provide a 3-min "How to play" video which you can show before players join their role, so that they know what to expect.

4. Invite participants

When it's time to invite the participants, you can head over to the "Invite Players" page of your session. From there, you can extract a link to the session lobby:

And from the lobby, players can easily choose a team/role or select "Join a random Position":

Pre-assign players using Excel

For more control, you can extract on Excel the links for each game/role. You can work on the file to write the name of the player in front of each role, then send the file to your audience by email:

5. Start the games and follow up the advancement

When players join a Lean game, it will first be in Tutorial mode. It means they can start practicing and follow the in-game onboarding slides, to understand how the game works.

Once all the players have gone through the explanations slides and are ready to get started, the instructor can Start the Game/Timer. This happens from the Session Follow-up page:

Players will then have a limited time to produce as many products as possible!

As an instructor, you can follow-up the advancement from the session Follow-up, or open the games as Observer from the Lobby to see what is happening in more details (you can open each game in different tabs of your browser to switch between them more easily) :

6. Debrief the results

Once a team has finished a game, they are brought to their Debriefing page. It includes several KPIs and graphs that players can freely analyze or download as PDF.

There are several sections in this debriefing page, which you can decide to show or hide in the session settings:

• Financial Results (P&L)
• Orders and Deliveries (Service level)
• Balance Chart
• Work in Process Evolution
• Quality Performance
• Value Adding /Non Value Adding activities (Flow efficiency)
• Capacity Utilization (Resource efficiency)

As an instructor, once all the teams are finished, you can take other the presentation and share your screen on the session results page. It includes all the data and graphs to deliver key insights, and animate a discussion with players.

The KPIs you can use to compare teams are:

• Bottom Line (P&L result)
• Throughput time
• Number of units sold
• Number of units sold on time
• Average WIP
• Number of Defects

You can also compare the detailed P&L of each team to see what what the main source of cost, and compare the balance charts of the different teams or of the same team through different rounds:

Using these graphs and the content on their respective debriefing page, you can animate a discussion to see what went wrong and how we could improve the operations.

7. Play the next rounds

From the top of the debriefing page, players are able to join the next round easily:

When playing rounds >=2, the participants will be able to experience how Lean Tools can improve the operations.

Default mode

If you had chosen to start with one of the "Default" scenarios, with improvements already pre-integrated, you should explain what is changing for this new round before the students start playing. You can use our powerpoint presentation to support this explanation (download it at the top of the page).

Players improvements

If you decided to let players implement improvements by themselves, at the beginning of round 2, they will be able to access the "Improvement" menu by clicking on the blue button on the left.

We advise one of the players in each team to do it, as otherwise they may overwrite each other's changes.

By default, they have a limited number of credits so they will need to choose which improvement to implement first:

If players are implementing improvements for round 3 and more, they are first able to import the changes they made in the past rounds: