As a Project Management Instructor, I like to include various ice breaker activities in my presentations for students to get to know each other as well as get hands on experience while learning various project management topics. One activity that shows the importance of effective stakeholder communication and the organizational structure is called the don’t say paper airplane activity. For this activity, teams of five will compete to throw their piece of paper the farthest and complete the project without using the words paper or airplane. Each team consists of the following stakeholders:
Project Sponsor – the person with the vision of the project. They are responsible for explaining what they want to build.
Project Manager – the person responsible for overseeing the project from start to finish, and approving and delivering the final product back to the sponsor.
Business Analyst – the person responsible for eliciting the requirements from the project sponsor, documenting those requirements and handing them over to the developer.
Developer – the person responsible for taking the requirements and building what was describes. At the start of this activity, the developer is not aware they are building a paper airplane.
Tester – the person responsible for testing what was built and passing or failing it based on the requirements identified. If failed, the process starts over (requirements, design, test) until they have a passed product (i.e., Paper Airplane).
Other than the sponsor, no one else is aware that they are not supposed to say paper or airplane. The goal or the activity is see how far a team can throw a piece of paper, can communicate to each other the best way to do that. Often, each team will produce a paper airplane without the requirements being clear from the start. This activity is designed to be used with the waterfall methodology first. Agile could be used with another team(s) and compare the differences when the sponsor is involved during the project lifecycle. At the end, once all paper airplanes have been created, they will be given back to the project sponsors so they can compete to see which paper airplane will fly the farthest.
As a twist, teams to not need to actually build a paper airplane as the goal communicated to them was to throw the piece of paper the furthest. As a demonstration, you can ball up a piece of paper and throw it to see if it would have gone father than the paper airplanes.
