Exercise: Battleship as a metaphor for Plans or Planning

This game may be all you'll ever need to know about project management :-)

You Lost! €-300.000

Exploring the relationship between action and plans, having a plan and planning, design and designing.(note: the game uses a dot "." separator for 'thousands' as per common usage in many countries)

The Rules of Planning Battleship

• There are 5 ships hidden in the grid - one ship of size 2, two ships of size 3, one ship of size 4, and one ship of size 5.  
• Reveal the ships by taking shots at grid coordinates.
• Each shot costs 10.000.
• You have a balance of 400.000 to spend on shots (i.e. equivalent to taking 40 shots).
• Try to generate a positive return.
• You only receive a payout if a whole ship is revealed. The payout is worth the ship size * 50,000.

Step 1: Design a pre-prepared plan of attack
Individuals produce one or more up-front plans using provided blank sheets.

Step 2a: Play Planning Battleship using the 40 shots per iteration game.

1. Open the playable version of battleship on https://tech.zilverline.com/battleship/public/index.html
2. Enter each of your pre-prepared plan of attacks.
3. Record your results in the survey form (survey form here) - these will be numbers from 1 - 40 and values from -400000 and above that are multiples of 10000.

Step 2b: Play Planning Battleship using the 10 shots per iteration game.

Step 2c: Play Planning Battleship using the 1 shots per iteration game.

Step 2d: Play Planning Battleship using another number of shots per iteration game.

Step 3:
Look at the results (data spreadsheet here)


Discussion:
What is an 'iteration' with respect to the game?

When does it make sense to run a project without feedback?

What is the 'design' with respect to the game?
What is 'strategy'  ?
What is 'project planning' ?
What (if anything) might this exercise highlight for projects in general?

What is the maximum payout? *1. 

What is the maximum cash position possible? *2.

Acknowledgement to Zilver - Zilverblog The Power of Feedback in Scrum:

Zilverline developed this simple version of the Battleship game, written in Javascript, as a tool to explore ideas related to the design and development and dynamics of projects.

• The difference between Plans and Planning
• The value of feedback
• Cost and reward
• The size of an effort versus the payback in terms of information
• The game-like nature of projects (like pinball, the goal is to play again?)

"Board layouts are random and you get 40 shots in total to destroy the enemy’s fleet. After each iteration you get feedback about hits and misses. If you use iterations of 1, you are playing the regular battleship-game. Each shot costs 10.000 and when you sink a ship you get the_ships_size * 50.000 (e.g. the submarine of size 3 will reward you with 150.000). If you keep track of the balance after each iteration, you could also try to get across the idea that stopping after a few iterations might give ‘good enough’ rewards."

The game can be downloaded from the GitHub repository as a zip or you can take a look at our code. Just double click on the index.html (in the public folder) to start a game.

Source code from Zilverline - https://github.com/zilverline/battleship

*1. Max payout from hits will be 5 ships of total size 17 * 50,000 = 850,000

*2.  Max cash position will be 1,080,000 (based on spending exactly 17 shots to gain 850000 and retaining 23 shots worth 230000, resulting in a retained profit of 1080000). Note that the game engine cannot be completed in this scenario.