7,600+ lego bricks, 60 base plates, 24 solid hours With Dropbox’s 2014 Hack Week around the corner, we built a gigantic lettered wall mural out of over 7,600 Lego pieces. Because this is such an unusual design medium, we ad libbed when we had to - from using medical tweezers (what we just had on hand) to pry and fling off misplaced Legos, to using a semi-archaic blueprinting program to map it all out. But in true hackathon spirit, I had a ton of fun (and got little sleep) while making this this past weekend. Your browser does not support the video tag. In every lettering project, I first start with a sketch in Photoshop and then head over to Illustrator to vectorize and clean up. We then plugged the illustration into Pic2Brick, a handy little program that allows you to input your file as well as the sizes of bricks that you’d like to use. It very helpfully spits out the most optimal combination of bricks to minimize time spent building (ie. it’ll grid out space for a 1x8 instead of eight 1x1s if possible).
This may seem like a small optimization, but when you’ve got thousands of Lego pieces to coordinate, cutting eight arm movements down to one is pretty key. And then began the most fun part - building! We printed out a nearly life-size version of the design with a grid applied to it that mapped to the baseplates, which measure 32 by 32 points, or 10 by 10 inches. I also adlibbed this system where I would count out the negative space distances from the corners to make sure these were where they were supposed to be, so even if I messed up within a grid, at least the edges would all still line up. I should note that it is pretty key to order as many extra smaller units as possible. For instance, I ran out of 1x6 yellows toward the end (simply because I hadn’t properly adhered to the blueprint in the beginning) and ended up freestyling the bottom 1/6 of the board. Thankfully these were swashes and so a bit more creative freedom can be taken with them (vs. actual letters), but if I had ran out of the smaller pieces I would have been in trouble as you can’t break a large brick into smaller ones (but you can use smaller ones to comprise larger units).
Adding the second layer was actually a lot easier than the first because it’s a simply a lot harder to begin drawing on a blank canvas without any references. Plus, the first layer was harder to remove directly from the base plates - without an actual Lego remover I ended up scrounging around our first aid kids and used sharp medical tweezers to fling the misplaced bricks off five feet in the air. 1. Preventatively bandage your fingertips because after your 7000th Lego motion they will seriously hurt. 2. Don’t forget about stuff like: transportation (once you stick 7000 Legos onto a board it will be a lot heavier than when you started) and mounting (you don’t want all your Lego pieces to fall off after your hard work!). 3. Having a blueprint was key. For those who don’t have access to bigger printers, you can just grid your design up as you would by baseplates and then print out each individual grid. That may end up being less cumbersome to reference when building, anyway.
4. I’d recommend looking into third party vendors to see if you can get a local bulk discount on ordering bricks and stuff - and definitely get one of these things. We spend so much time at our computers these days that having an excuse to work with such a simple unit - and a beloved throwback to our childhood, no less (I’m looking at you, 90s babies) was just such a treat. Note: This project first and foremost was inspired by the amazing folks at Invisible Creature and was originally Tymn’s brilliant idea. Thank you to Don of IC for giving us some invaluable advice on planning. The incredible Sam and Drew also helped procure, assemble, and spray-paint the base for this, which is a lot harder to do than one might initially think in windy San Francisco (read: leaves and grass blowing all over wet paint).As part of the apprentice-craftsmen Programme at Codurance, I had the privilege to attend the Certified Scrum Product Owner course at Skills Matter. During the two-day course, I learnt many techniques to deliver value efficiently, and I am going to share a less widely known tool to help teams visualise interruptions.
Keeping track of interruptions helps teams improve their productivity during inspect and adapt activities such as daily meetings and retrospectives. In order to turn impediments into opportunities, both development team and stakeholders should collaborate, support and trust each other. These concepts are at the foundation of “shared responsibility”: everybody is responsible for the success of the business. Sharing opinions about what is decelerating the team performance is easy in the best-case scenario where we know that no one will assign blame. However, the culture of fear is still widespread in most organisations and people are afraid of being blamed. When people stop sharing their concerns, they lose motivation and start to leave it to the Scrum Master and the Product Owner to fix their problems. Team members' concerns turn into frustrations and become internalised. Impediments become even harder to identify when people are afraid to speak up in front of stakeholders. The LEGO Wall has been conceived to reduce the fear factor when identifying impediments.
It is an artifact to keep interruptions visible while ensuring anonymity. The whole Scrum Team (Product Owner included!) is involved and the Scrum Master facilitates the LEGO Wall Setup Session, explaining the importance of tracking interruptions. The LEGO Wall gives voice to the team’s frustrations. By collecting and displaying real data, it creates the conditions to discuss the interruptions. At a glance, the team is able understand: The core part of the Setup Session is to build a collective understanding of the type of interruptions the team has to deal with. The teammates share their experience and at the end of the discussion they decide to keep track of top categories of interruptions – keeping them to a maximum of five. After that, they can assign a brick colour to each of them. In the example shown in the pictures the team identified 4 categories: “Business as Usual (BAU)” is the time spent on the ceremonies and the artifacts associated with the development process. These include: meetings, creating reports, writing documents, etc.
The category “Help the PO” encompasses the activities that the development team is asked to do to help the Product Owner prioritise stories (backlog refinement sessions). In fact, these activities should be considered part of the work, but often the development team perceives these activities as interruptions. Work is not only about coding, UX design or testing; it also involves collaboration with the PO, as these activities are also essential to delivering value. You can build a LEGO Wall with as many base plates as you need, in order to display: You will need colourful LEGO bricks to display interruptions and LEGO figures to represent an anonymous team member. From the pictures, you can see that the team decided to use LEGO figures to represent themselves. This is because this activity should be pleasurable as well as useful. In fact, I recommend creating your own figure as if you are playing a tabletop game. Thanks to the modularity of LEGO and the figures from movies and comics, you can be whoever you want and change your character as many times as you like, so that you can keep your anonymity.
Lego is an excellent tool to visualise interruptions because: I suggest you hang the LEGO Wall in a place that would be highly visible to the team and stakeholders. We want to trigger discussions in front of it. The LEGO Wall displays real and meaningful data that can be extremely useful during retrospectives. The more colourful the LEGO Wall gets the more margin of improvements the team and the organisation can work on to deliver more value. Since the LEGO Wall is not a micro-management tool, at the end of every day, each team member should update it exclusively with bricks assigned to each category of impediment. The white bricks should be added only at the end of the Sprint. They have the function of highlighting the time spent to achieve the Sprint goal so that it’s easy to compare how much time the team has spent working and how much time has been spent on interruptions. The LEGO Wall is a collector for meaningful data that shows how the Sprint went. If the LEGO Wall shows that the team has spent more time on fixing bugs then delivering new value, then they may need to put more focus on quality.
Thanks to this effortless way of gathering data the team can set up discussions with stakeholders and, together, find ways to reduce impediments and improve team capacity. Production and release support interruptions are an opportunity to invest in better delivery practices. BAU interruptions can be reduced by asking a couple of questions: If the answer to the second question is YES then it means that it’s not an interruption but it’s work that should be prioritised. The LEGO Wall is a powerful tool to get an idea on how much time the team can spend on working to deliver new value instead of working on problems inherited from previous Sprints. However, this is not a step-by-step recipe because this tool can be used in several ways according to the following variables: I suggest staying focused on the principles and importance of this activity (honesty, transparency, courage, inspect and adapt). Don't be afraid of experimenting and changing this to suit your needs. If you start looking at things from another perspective, you might realise that impediments and interruptions are actually opportunities for improvement.