No Time to Play? Why You Should Use Gamification in Agile Projects – SKILup Days 2024

Hi everyone. I'm so happy that you could join us today for this really cool topic. I'm very excited to talk about this as well.

So gamification. Gamification is something that probably a lot of you, techies or computer geeks might know, but it's not necessarily something that we are putting into project management very often. Um, the deal with that is projects always have constraints of time, money, we know the drill.

Anything extra, anything fancy usually gets left behind. But being an agile coach, I'm really passionate about gamification and I really think it will make your project go so much better, so much smoother, and also will really boost the motivation of people in your project. Um, as I'm dealing with a lot of like agile transformation projects and also like getting more agile techniques into organizations and doing that through pilot projects, I think it's really interesting to see what we do in such circumstances.

And then we can also map it to like more general projects like where can I use this? How can I use this? How will it help me?

And basically also give you a couple of pointers on how to sell it because you will have to ask for maybe extra time, extra funding for this. And I think it's really, really a cool thing that will merit the investment that you'll put into this. So that said, let's get going.

No time to play. Why you should use gamification in your adult projects. So we are going to have, have a look specifically at how it can improve motivation.

'cause that's, I think, one of the biggest advantages that we have. Having a motivated project team will get just so much more work done and also get work done smarter, I think. And a lot of this is coming from the agile idea of having people collaborate, participate, being cross-functional.

Those are a lot of things that actually happen in projects already. So it's a beautiful mix. So what does that entail?

What do we do here? So the elements of gamification come from game design basically. Um, it's actually a pretty old concept.

So it started in, was coined I think around 2006. And it came from of course game design. It like all of that things, all of those things.

But it's very interesting to see how it has moved on since then. So if we talk about gamification now we're talking more about like a, a rough concept. So it's a concept about making things look like games.

And if you know the movie Mary Poppin, you will know what that means because, um, that is what she actually does with the children, right? She comes in, she says, chores are no fun, let's make a game out of it. And you can get prizes when you do it right, and when your room is really clean, uh, you will get an enterprise and we'll all be happy and it will, will have been a lot of fun and we'll sing while we're doing it and so on.

So that is like a good metaphor, what gamification actually is. It is taking things that might not seem very attractive right now that seemed like a chore that very possibly you will be doing over and over again. And then taking an element of that and turning it into a game by giving you some sort of like rewards, um, making achievements and goals out of it and then having fun while you do it.

So why is this so powerful? And the interesting thing is that it really taps into our human desire for competition, uh, in one way, like trying to be as good, as good as everybody else, or maybe even better. And it'll also help us see progress and achievement a lot better, which is basically what motivates us.

Seeing progress and achievement will give us this sense of accomplishment. And that is something that as human beings, we really need if we want to keep going. And in the projects where we have like little time and we have uh, a lot of stuff that needs to get done, motivation really is key.

So people not hitting a slump or not, um, getting behind on things or development just because they're not that motivated anymore, that's something we absolutely cannot be doing in our project. So gamification is a good idea for that. Another thing is it is fundamentally rooted in the way we learn.

If you look at how children learn, which is the most fundamental way of learning child play we call it. Um, it is they will try something out, they will see how it goes, and then they will try again, try again, try again. So there is no shame in play, which is very interesting because we know from behavioral science and psychology that when people feel really safe to try things, they will grow and learn more.

So if there's no shame in play and there's only learning through trial and error, it's the perfect and environment to do new things, which is in essence what projects usually do, right? We will introduce new things into an organization and hopefully that will benefit us for a long time to come. It's very often tied to strategic initiatives, maybe like organization-wide benefits that we want to reap.

And what better idea to really create a psychologically safe and shame-free environment for people to get the best ideas out there. Not just produce some sort of solution, but like the best, most innovative solution for us. So really cool.

How do we do it? In essence, there are, I would say four different sections of things that we do in game design that can be applied, um, very differently. I will show you a couple of examples after this, but in essence, it's about making it look like a game.

And if you're thinking of role playing games like RPGs or like, I dunno, any other sort of like computer game that you're playing, that's probably the way to go with, uh, thinking how it could look like. So it's about points and badges. For instance, we will have in this the agile element of visual management.

So we will make, um, milestones visual. The, the progress and the status of things becomes more tangible because we will use, um, points that can be accumulated. We will have badges to show how far people have come.

And this is also a sort of a cultural motivator because if I can wear my badge prominently, if that is digital on screen or just like have it on some sort of physical board in, in my team room, um, I will, I will be the king, right? People will be looking at me like, oh my God, look at that. She got that badge, she must be amazing, right?

So it's a sort of a cultural thing where we feel like we have gained some sort of status in a group and that is something that just motivates us as um, beings who like to be in groups and feel good about themselves while doing so, right? It's, it's a thing that will also boost morale and it will boost my, my um, my thinking about myself in the sense of I have, I have done this, I have the badge to show for it. Why can't I tackle that one?

Right? So that is self uh, self-explanatory I guess. Then we have challenges and rewards.

Now this all already exists a bit in like, um, operational elements like uh, if we look at it incentives for instance. But when we're talking about game design or gamification, challenges and rewards become very different because what we want is we want people to not be too comfortable, right? We want them to move into the learning zone and this only happens if they step across their own boundaries, but that makes us feel unsafe and it could involve making mistakes, right?

So we need to be able to show them that it is actually worth it to grow your skills here and we will give you a motivator to do so. Very often this is done for groups, so like team challenges or team rewards because one element as we've just, uh, learned about a game design is that there is competition. But when we're in a project and we actually want everybody to collaborate really well, having competition doesn't always make it better.

So in the sense we'll use challenges that can be applied to groups and where we can have people collaborate and we will reward them for collaborating, well, for instance, for sharing their knowledge, for instance. Um, so we are going to be rewarding things that we might not necessarily reward in the sense of like classic traditional incentives, like how many things did you get done this year? And so on.

So it's more about behavior that we want to, um, that we want to reward. And then there is leaderboards. Leaderboards are a bit tricky sometimes because it goes into that same area of competition, which is not always what we want.

Um, but it is a thing that can help, for instance, if we want to motivate people to invest in continuous improvement. So if we have a, a project for instance that doesn't go on for a month, but maybe a bit longer, right? Like a half a year or a year long project, at least it really makes sense to have leaderboards but then have leaderboards on on different things.

So I don't need to like only reward those people that are good at that one arbitrary thing, but like have a couple of different options for people to really excel to drive their performance. And this is a very personal motivator because me seeing my name at the top of that leaderboard will motivate me a lot. Um, of course it's also a bit status, but it's less that visual status maybe that points and badges can do because I can accumulate those and getting to the top of the leaderboard and staying there is just one thing, right?

So it's a, it's a very personal thing and it also ties to whether that leaderboard actually does something for me. So if it's a leaderboard for instance on collaboration, I would probably want to be at the top of it, but it's a, if it's a leader bardo but something else I might not care about it, right? So it needs to be a personal motivator for it to click.

And then of course the fourth element in anything we do, whether that is agile or project, it's feedback and feedback is also interestingly a big part of game design because as we have learned there is a lot of trying, playing, learning through trial and error, making mistakes. So if I want to get ahead, I need to understand where my mistakes have been. So giving feedback really gives me transparency about the goal.

What, what should I have done? What should I have done differently maybe and how can I excel the next time? How can I meet the goal the next time?

So it's about understanding skill gaps and this is a motivator that will fuel engagement because continuous feedback will then help me continuously achieve things which is continuous engagement, which will motivate me, right? So this is the long term thing basically that we want to do. So now that we've looked at the power of game design or gamification and the elements of gamification, let's put this into a project and into an agile context 'cause that's what we're here for, right?

Adult project management. So what is next? The easiest way to quickly add in gamification into your project or your adult project is by uh, just adding it to the adult events that you're probably, or hopefully doing anyway.

So you could have some sort of planning sessions, whether that is like a team level iteration planning or sprint planning or however you wanna call it or whether that's like project level planning, it doesn't matter. So when you are actually going into that, there are a lot of techniques that you might already use that maybe you didn't even know were gamification in the first place. So having point-based games poker for instance.

Yeah, so, uh, story, uh, uses, uh, uses story points and planning poker is actually gamification 'cause it takes something that's actually pretty serious seeing how much we can get done in the next week or the next sprint or the next iteration. But we're using fun, funny, colorful cards and we're doing it in a poker based game format, right? So it's, it's making it fun but it should still not distract from what we're doing, which is effort estimation, right?

So this is the perfect combination for instance of gamification trying to make something that we have to do anyway, make it fun, but we still want to have results, right? So it can't just all be games. And if we're looking at this, this is I think one of the main issues that we have when we want to try to gamify things a bit.

If people from outside, especially like management or upper management that don't have the time to really sit around and see what we're doing in detail, if they come around the corner and they see us playing poker, they'll be like, are they even working? Right? So we will tackle that at a later stage in this presentation.

But for now, keep in mind that might be part of the problem. If it looks like too fun, people might think we're not working so we need to make sure that we are still having results. So this is why very often, even if it's gamified, we will have somebody like an agile coach or team coach or we might even call him a game master, doesn't really matter to facilitate what's going on to make sure that we are not getting distracted playing and we are actually arriving at what we want, which is in this case planning poker effort estimations.

Another thing that we could do when we are setting up our planning session is to include a small topic of team-based challenges. So let's say um, we are setting an iteration goal anyway or a sprint goal, you might know that term better, then it actually makes sense to put in a challenge and a reward for that. So for instance, we could do something like um, an objectives and key results related thing in the sense of we don't wanna get a hundred percent necessarily, that will be amazing, but it's not a perfect world and we know it.

So how about 80? Let's say 80% and if we reach that 80% it will be an instant pizza party for everyone. So it's little things like this that actually are the challenges and awards we're looking at.

We will not be looking at buying everybody a Ferrari, right? We'll be looking at small things that motivate us, that keep us going, but that they're not so high stakes that people get frustrated. And on the other side also not that high stakes that it's just too expensive to do it right?

We need to have the business sense in mind as well there. So not too expensive small motivators. Um, things that just make me happy and keep me going.

Basically this would be an example for team-based challenges. And if we are looking at more of those, what about daily or standup meetings? So it doesn't matter whether we're doing like daily scrums or standup meetings from Lean or Kanban or a mixture of that or if we're standing up at all because I've seen a lot of standup meetings where nobody stands, which is fun, but okay.

Um, things that we do there is we will probably use a visual task board anyway, right? Um, we should in agile with visual management, but if we're doing it in a project, it might contain some, a couple of more like progress trackers on it. We'll probably be looking at a couple more metrics maybe than we do like in our general like um, operational team delivery processes because we are like set for time and, and um, and iteration constraints, right?

The project can only go so long and after that it's disbanded so there's more crunch around time. So we'll have a couple more progress tracking metrics going on and that is the easiest thing to just transform into uh, a sort of progress tracking that will encourage daily achievements or micro rewards. We might call it kudos is an example of that.

Kudos are something that I personally loved that that happened. Usually a person did something that was amazing and I wanna give them kudos for it in the sense of I want to recognize they did an awesome thing and it's a feedback type of reward where I will just say, I'm really grateful that you did this, you helped me on this, uh, and so on. And these are the like small kinds of achievements we can track as well.

So we will not only be tracking progress towards goals, but also maybe progress towards um, team values like collaboration, helping each other out and so on. And then deliver kudos to each other every day as part of the daily standup can be a small thing. We all know a daily standup shouldn't take too long, but it really motivates people and it will bring a sort of gamification element into it if we actually also track it.

For instance, we could do points, we can do smiley stickers, you won't believe it, but it's the child in us that responds and loves it. So stuff like that actually really makes a difference. Uh, having funny memes as well.

Still, still a runner is still a good thing to do. So what else can we do retrospective If we're sitting in retrospectives, everything is basically about feedback already anyway, so why not add to that? Um, doing like our serious retrospective, like everything that was tough, everything that we have to improve on, everything that went really well.

Um, let's get that checked out and after we've done that, try to go for maybe a bit lighter, um, stuff in your retrospective to basically round up and end your retrospective. So I would put it at the end, um, after all of the serious things have been discussed, basically in all the, the items that we want to do, um, have been created and then maybe use a fun voting tool. Uh, digital voting tool works best.

Even if we are physically co-located, it's just easy to pull it up on your phone for instance. There are a couple out there I will not necessarily tell you this one is the best 'cause it really depends on what you need, but something that is visual that is fun, that is fast, that does not involve people setting up like really terribly uh, hard to crack accounts. So something that that is easy to use and something that's colorful because it needs to be gamified, right?

So that would be a good idea. We could use this to give feedback for instance, have like uh, star voting. Um, how did you think this retrospective went?

How did you think the iteration went or the sprint went? Um, and we can use different sort of icons for that to make it fun and change these out from time to time. Another thing that really resonated with uh, with teams and a lot of projects that I was on was to have voting tools for new ideas because you all know it, we go into that retrospective, there's like so much you want to actually change and challenge so much to improve on.

And you have that list of like 50 items or whatever and actually that's way too much to tackle anyway. We need to prioritize and why not prioritize by using digital voting tool. So voting for ideas and then maybe have some sort of like reward for the person whose ideas got voted on most for that iteration and so on.

That could be a cool gamification idea. Another thing would be to have these like action items, um, to actually like have progress bars for them to check follow who, because we all know that daily business just sometimes gets in the way and then in the end these improvements, they're the least prioritized, right? So that is a sad thing because if we improve on our collaboration on our internal processes, it will actually help us to produce stuff faster next time.

But very often the pressure to produce results or features or whatever just gets so high that we forget about our action items that we wanted to do and they just get pulled from iteration to iteration. So let's try to at least have a little bit of focus on that by having these progress bars, by putting them up visually on our physical or digital dashboards. And then say let's say if we reach 80%, if you reach 90%, like have a tiered thing going on, there will be some sort of rewards that will happen if we actually achieve that.

So you see it's always the same thing. Make it fun, make it colorful, make it easy to access, take the shame out of it, put the game the fun into it, but still have end results motivate people. That's what we want to do.

So this has us been looking at adult events. Now might be that you're not using agile events in your project, um, might also be that you are looking for bit more serious things that you can use gamification for maybe even bigger than just like team events or project events. So let us have a look at pro project challenges, typical project challenges.

And it doesn't matter if it's an agile project or a not so agile project or whatever you wanna call it. Um, the things that are usually the problem in projects are the same. Um, when you're agile, sometimes it's even harder to be honest because not everybody might be agile or agile.

Maturity is not that high yet. So let's have a look. So the first thing I think in projects that happens, especially in very long project is maintaining momentum is very hard.

And this especially touches projects that are about innovation, new things, solutions that we didn't think of before and where we want to be really innovative. But then after time gets in the way, sometimes the constraints get so tight that we just, we can't think out of the box anymore. So maintaining that innovation and that that momentum that we had in the beginning where we had like bright eyes and huge ideas on how to change the world, it would be really nice if we could, could still get there.

And if that's not possible, at least have the motivation to keep going. So what is really cool for this is something that helps me to keep going and motivates me to keep going, right? So a streak is really cool.

We all know it probably from our uh, fitness wearables, from whatever other things we have. If we have a streak, like for instance, I logged in every day and I got a small reward for it, which might be completely digital and maybe it's not even money or whatever, it's like actually just an intangible thing, but it was colorful and made me happy, then I would probably want to log in tomorrow again and the day after and the day after. And it would be really sad if I had kept that going for like two weeks and then just because I missed a day I didn't do it right.

There are a lot of apps out there that will use this concept to motivate people. Um, and if you've used them enough, you might also know that sometimes it gets tiring and if you miss a day really frustrating and then you might never do it again. But still it's a cool idea to motivate teams or motivate people to uh, reward consistent performance.

And in project, the thing about this is very often when we're talking about um, what actually is good performance, people will say, well when lines are going up, we are performing well, but actually it is way better to achieve a good level of quality performance and then stay at that level because nobody can get better and better and better. That's just the road to burnout, right? And we want our teams and projects to have a consistent level of good quality output.

So we will encourage steady progress, we will encourage consistent performance. So what we want is a team that will consistently put out good quality work and the output is consistently the same amount. This is better than a team that will race to the finish line to get something done.

And after that we'll be sick for two weeks, right? That's not helpful at all. Specifically if our project like at the set timeframe.

So use things like burn charts, meters for velocity and capacity or lead time that you might be using anyway. And if we can get for instance those, those metrics to be within a very consistent strip, like let's say the velocity is always between this amount and that amount. Um, the capacity is always the same per day divided.

Uh, basically the, the median is always this much, um, work or effort points a day and we don't strain more than 20% upward down. We will get a reward at the end of an iteration. And if we can keep that up for at least three or four iterations, the price will be a bit bigger.

So this will really help us to not overwork ourselves very helpful and also to consistently be motivated to continue. Next thing that is very often a project challenge is aligning stakeholder expectations. Um, and I put that double in there probably because it's so important.

So aligning stakeholder expectations to maybe expectations that the team might have. Uh, we all know they can be wildly different, right? What is stakeholder holder thinks is necessary or needs to be done can be very different from that which a developer maybe thinks needs to be done.

And developer is obviously here. Anybody who helps working on a pro product, uh, doesn't need to be an IT developer, right? It's an agile developer.

So what we want to do is we want to gamify requirements gathering now in adult that is already quite gamified if we use the adult tools for it. So using personas for instance, um, fictional people that we make up that are based on user uh, representatives but that are also fun to create. We give them a name, right?

Which can be fun, uh, shouldn't be stereotypical but should still be fun. And then we will do stuff like journey maps, like really getting into the minds of these personas. What would they do?

What would they want in our product and so on. Um, that is in essence a gamification thing. Also prioritization with point-based broker, you already know that probably, but there is also one that's called buy a feature, which is really interesting because it's done with stakeholders instead.

So stakeholders will gather and they will see for instance all of the things that we need to do very often this will be in a product backlog for instance, or it will be a feature list and then everybody will get like 100 fictional euros, dollars, whatever. And they will be able to buy features with this. And we will probably tell them this feature is this size, this feature is this size, this feature is this size.

So based on effort we'll have given them dollar amounts or euro amounts and they can buy stuff with it, which will force them to prioritize in essence, right? And to really think about do I really want this 'cause I only have this much money left, maybe they need to go to another person and talk to them about how important this thing is and maybe they can pull the resources and so on. So it helps with collaboration, um, understanding priority and when the development team can be there and just sit through that and have a look at what they're doing and why they're making these decisions, it can really help with alignment as well because they will understand why stakeholders will want certain things.

So that's a cool thing to do. And we called it stakeholder engagement gains because yes, I know sitting there and calling it requirements engineering session, that is basically what it might be. But if you call it stakeholder engagement games, it just gets fun and words make a difference.

It changes a thing in our brain, right? So that can already happen and make us happy, but words alone are not, are not enough, right? So we need to have cool names for workshops but we also need to have cool, um, techniques that we use so that it will still be found otherwise it will feel set up and not real and that's not a good thing.

So following through on the cool name, having a couple of cool techniques like uh, bio feature for instance can really make a difference. So actually these are not big things. So you can see that there are just small things that we could integrate into stuff that we're already doing in the project anyway, which is key because if we have to set up like a whole new elaborate kind of gamification thing, that's not what our time and money is for in the project, right?

So always connecting it to things that we're already doing anyway, changing and turning them those into gamified elements, that's what we want. Another thing that we very often want is mindset shifts. Especially if we are in agile transformation project or projects that will introduce new ideas, new mindsets, agile mindsets into an organization or that's at least what we're trying to do, right?

So very often we have a problem with change. Uh, changes is uncomfortable, everything new is scary, everything that is new can go wrong. Um, we might not know how to deal with this because we have never done this before and so on.

So in essence, when we feel safe again, we will accept a mindset shift. And how do we do this Well by telling people that it is okay to fail, but also by giving people time and appreciation for when they actually do change something. So what very often worked in projects that I was in was something called change management quests, or we called it change management quest.

And we would for instance, um, have gamified learning experiences. So we would say this is what we want you to learn. Let's say we're in an um, adult transformation and everybody should have down the basics of a couple of adult approaches.

For instance, we would say, so you can do things like you can do a scrum training, you could do a Kanban training and you can do a couple of add-on trainings, like maybe reaching a couple of levels. You could also take the exam to call yourself a product owner or a scrum master or whatever. So all of these things could be like tiered rewards and we would set that up as such and visualize them.

Um, so if you go through this point and then you can go through that next and to that next here at the end is a reward for instance. Or we could for instance also reward adult values or behaviors when they're displayed. Um, that is a bit more tricky because it's basically rewarding culture when it is being lived, right?

So I'll give you an example of that on the next slide where we'll be talking about um, how to implement uh, value and how to do peer reviews. So keep your eye out on that if that is something you're interested in. We'll get to that in just a second.

But basically we are rewarding good behavior you could say. So we've talked about things we can do on team levels or in adult events. We talked about tackling project challenges with gamification and that what was one too fast.

Let us go here and have a look at large gamification projects or large initiatives and I want to use gamification for this. Uh, let me just quickly see that I haven't double clicked. Yes.

Okay, so this is the next one. So what can we do? So we've stayed mostly at teamwork project level until now.

So we've talked about iteration based challenges. We've talked about skill development, like having um, uh, basically tiered uh, rewards for going through certain like skill trainings. We talked about daily engagement recognition for instance, rewarding stuff that happens every day in the daily standup or things that will happen continuously, for instance, like continuous delivery of quality output.

But what if I want to take that to the next level? What if I want to, um, use gamification in a bigger initiative? What if my project is part of a bigger program, for instance, for agile transformation or what if it even reaches up to the portfolio level, which would basically mean that you're rolling something out across the whole organization, I would say.

But that's the levels we can talk about in the sense of project management or PPM, right? Project program portfolio management. So if I'm looking at the program level, it becomes more about stuff that happens between teams.

So we would have cross-functional or inter-team competitions. Uh, always friendly competitions. Mind you never in the sense of uh, that there are like definitive losers or something.

That's not what it's about, right? We want to have rewards for that. And I'll show you a couple of ideas that we can use this for in a minute.

Um, on how to make it a friendly competition. We would maybe have something like release train gamification if that's a thing we're using. It's a term uh, from safe obviously.

But anything that could be the same as that is, for instance, if we have the output of several projects and we have released them together, then we could have a party or something that would already be some sort of uh, similar thing for the program level. We could reward quarterly achievements as a whole program. So when we as a program get to our objectives and key results, for instance, if we hit our deadlines there, if we hit our goals there, we might reward all of the projects that helped, um, helped us get there.

Um, and then we have the portfolio level. This is where we're talking about organization wide things. We could have organization wide leaderboards, which would lend itself very well actually to agile behaviors or like new, uh, new ways of thinking that we want to introduce or maybe just like rewarding values like collaboration generally.

Um, then we want to have strategic goal alignment games, which means that we will set goals for us that align with the strategy that our organization wants to put out. And when we reach those, we will get recognized for it, not just in front of like 10 people but like in front of the whole company. So it would be some sort of like event, which is why we call it games very often, where we will actually pull people up to a stage and say thank you and give them a reward for something.

And then we could have annual innovation or transformation quests. Uh, another way to say this would be hackathons if you want the more boring word or innovation days. So that is a thing we could do as well.

Obviously this is not something we can only do at the portfolio level. So let us have a look at where we could put these things into action and how they can actually benefit us on our projects as well. So if we want to implement gamification, what we want to do is we want to set clear objectives.

We want to define specific goals for our gamification. Um, for instance, do we want to reward behavior? Do we want to uh, reward other things?

Uh, do what do we want to track? And um, when we're tracking metrics, it's usually important that we don't just track because we can. So it should have a goal in mind and we should make sure that we align, gain game elements with the desired outcomes that we have.

Just rewarding people for stuff 'cause we think it's fun. Yeah, that's also gamification. But in a project we want alignment 'cause we don't have much time and budget, right?

So that is important. Then we want, uh, to make sure that we start small. We do not want to confuse people with too many things because you know how it is when you're starting a new game, right?

It can be very confusing in the beginning. Uh, we don't want that 'cause people still have to work, right? So we'll just start small, maybe have one or two gamified elements, maybe when this becomes more like used to to people, we will introduce a couple more.

We'll gradually expand and we'll always ask teams, uh, on feedback on other results. Did this motivate you? Did this not motivate you?

Without this feedback, don't introduce anything else. Okay? Then next we want to make sure that we do actually measure iterations as well.

So we want to track key metrics. For instance, as I said, this continuous output is really important or having people not overextend themselves, but to deliver quality output, something like this is really inter uh, interesting to have a look at and that is one of the things that I would definitely do, but I would also continuously refine this approach because if we do the same in every project, it's less of a game and more of business as usual, right? So it still needs to be a game.

So we should tweak things from time to time. And then we want to involve people. We want to ask them what would motivate you?

What would you like to be rewarded for? Um, collaborate with them on this gamification design that already can be a really fun step to take people along. And that can be like already a gamified experience for people as well.

And we want to make sure that the games actually resonate with culture and with preferences. So this is very important if you have like globally distributed teams because maybe for one culture something might be really cool and for another it might not be that important. So be mindful of this and always ask people, did this work, did this motivate you?

Why not? And these things will emerge but on their own. So now that we've talked about next steps, let us have a look what else is out there?

So what else can we do when we're talking about gamification? I think it's interesting to see all of these like potential things that you could do, but I think one of the things that you, um, that will help you most is probably also having real life examples. And this is what I want to give you next.

So bear with me and we will have a look at what we can do next. Alright? So mm-hmm, there.

It's, let's have a look at how to enhance project and team collaboration. And now we want to have real examples. So it doesn't matter what kind of a project you're in, if you're a project or program, whatever, you just need to make sure that it happens at the right level basically and that you make the rewards fitting and that you make it fitting to culture and to cross-functional team things, right?

But the basic basics are the same. So we want to for instance, help people, um, gain skills because it's important for them in a new project, in a new initiative to grow and learn. Um, and we want them to adapt new things, new behaviors as well.

So nothing better than a learning path or skill treat. We'll know it in games. It's, you can have skills that build on each other and at the end you will get a reward for it, right?

You'll get some sort of thing that makes your look your player character better, faster and so on. So what we want is we want to visualize team member growth. So this is a individual thing, right?

This is for a single person and it'll help them to value continuous learning, but it will also improve if we give people the option of having mentor mentee relationships and then to guide each other maybe as a team or as um, as a mentor, as a mentee to get through these skill trees. So this is where we talk about, for instance, collaborating with your, um, team leads or collaborating with your, with your agile coaches or your team coaches and setting incentives basically based on the skills that I accumulate during the project and integrate them into reviews and rewards that we get. Then we want to have things like team level rewards where we move away from the individual and now want more collaboration.

So we will have team dashboards probably in an agile project anyway, so let's gamify them. Um, the thing that has been really fun and very helpful actually is to give people power up. So you can see the language is just stolen from games basically a lot of the time.

So what is a power up? It's a thing that I can use to, for a short amount of time, be better at something, right? For instance, when Mario, it's the mushroom or whatever, right?

You know from that what a power op is or I hope you do 'cause that means you still know what Mario is all about. So in that sense, we want to give people power ops or rewards for collaborative actions. For instance, I helped another person this iteration or in this project stage or whatever and then I will be awarded at power up if I'm lucky.

Um, and we will do this usually based on peer review. So another person will say, you know what Ruth, you've helped me so much this ation, I want to award you a power op for collaboration, for helping, for, we should set the areas in which people can give power ops. And this power op for instance would say, um, that I get out of making coffee for everybody or like a small thing that will make me happy or I can have an hour early off work next week, uh, and so on.

So something that will actually benefit me that is a reward, but it shouldn't be too big because we don't want people to be sad if they don't get it right. We want to have small consistent motivation going on that helps most. And then we could have team goals and rewards for collaboration or commitment as a team when we fully committed, for instance, to this amount we can do and we will deliver it and we actually did that should be rewarded as a team, not necessarily single people, but then we all work together.

Everybody contributed in some way and we will only get the reward as a team, which means that we need to help each other also, right? So that is a cool thing to do. If we go a bit higher than that and to the project level, we want to have cross-functional quest.

So we want to make sure that we want to do things like hackathons, we want to do things like innovation days. Um, and this is suitable for specifically complex problems. So in every project there are those like really complex problems or things where stakeholders don't align or we just have an issue finding the real solution or uh, it's maybe we're even producing some sort of like software and there's a really big problem we can't get behind it.

Um, something like this, if we're talking um, uh, project uh, development for instance, we will be accumulating those types of problems and issues, right? And then regularly setting maybe half a day or a day aside to get into groups, um, break up teams as they are working in the project and just cross-functionally putting people together a new, um, new teams basically for that specific hackathon or innovation day. And then having them crack crack those, those issues, having them have a go at a new innovative solution.

Very often we find that mixing people up and having them look at things from a fresh perspective sometimes really helps on getting solutions for these problems that have been bugging us for weeks now. And it will give us really good benefits in the sense of real solutions for problems we couldn't solve in the pop in the project before. Better quality products, better quality outputs because of that, making customers and stakeholders and users happier because of it.

But we should also give people the hackathon and or innovation date as a reward. 'cause it's usually a bit more unstructured and it usually includes something like food drink, right? Something that feels more like parly, less like work, but it's so fun to do and give us, it gives us real results.

And then we could have things like innovator or motivator, uh, badges. Um, we could give out badges on a project level and maybe after every, um, stage and we could sit down and say, okay, so here are the awards. Have people vote anonymously on their phone.

And then we will call people up to a stage and give them like a badge for something. Maybe it also is tied to a small reward, but the badge itself is already a really nice reward and people will be proud of it and show it and be like, yeah, I got this reward for being the best innovator because I motivated the teams most this stage and so on. So that's a really cool thing to do as well.

Another thing we might want to implement is project level peer rewards. So, uh, we want to for instance, have maybe point systems going on and we would call these MVPs, uh, as an iterate, as an alternative to most valuable player. We'll call the most valuable peer and we will reward things that maybe we usually don't look at that much.

So for instance, we want to have, um, the person who was, was funniest, who cooked the best coffee. Small things that everybody can achieve that makes sense and it usually is somebody else that's, that's going to be fun and they can get, uh, a badge for that maybe as well. Or we would have those people awarded that usually people don't see.

Um, those are the people that make sure that everybody is running, everybody has what they need. Um, the people that don't get a thanks so often and we would call this a secret achiever recognition. So, um, we would have anonymous voting for that and then we would, um, depending on if the person likes it or not, or if we want to make this public or not give out achievements for things that otherwise we might not recognize.

This makes sure that we don't only reward people who are like, um, very high achievers in the sense of skills or output, but also softer skills, um, that we still need in a team so that people stay happy and stay motivated. So now that we have talked so much about all of this beautiful gamification, um, actually really want to hear your questions and I want to know what you guys are thinking, uh, whether you think you can apply it in your projects, in your agile projects, um, what is needed, what is still missing, what do you want to know? So I will be moving on to the question section.

Thank you for listening to me and I hope that you will try gamification out in your next adult project. Thank you.