How can the project manager incorporate gamification into your management work?

Very Good Point Jose.

In construction projects, we used gamification to express safety on site to people and it made a big difference when compared to words.

Hi Karthik
This is an important part of gamification the extrinsic motivation promoted by some kind of reward (material reward). There is a great challenge today in promoting conditions to people have intrinsic motivation, some kind of internal force that make us to act spontaneously and with enjoyment and fun. As you can see it's a big challenge! Both aspects are important and a good project must make the choices and balancing according to each specific situation. The situations you described are very valuable experience to add others important behavioral traits and then improve your projects. Congratulations!

Hi Rami,

gamification is great (and most often used) to increase compliance. The main reason: To gamify a process, that is to create a context that drives a specific desired behavior, it is very helpful to be able to clearly define the desired behavior.

The more operational a task, the easier it is to gamify. This is the main reason why the majority of gamification applications are found in areas with very low complexity of tasks, e.g. in call centers ("follow the script"), operating software ("enter all information correctly/timely"), marketing ("click this button"), etc.

In addition, "being compliant" is typically not the most exciting of activities and benefits most from some extra motivation...

Hi Karthik
This is an important part of gamification the extrinsic motivation promoted by some kind of reward (material reward). There is a great challenge today in promoting conditions to people have intrinsic motivation, some kind of internal force that make us to act spontaneously and with enjoyment and fun. As you can see it's a big challenge! Both aspects are important and a good project must make the choices and balancing according to each specific situation. The situations you described are very valuable experience to add others important behavioral traits and then improve your projects. Congratulations!

Hi Thirukkumaran, here is a great (and very simple) example of gamification in a factory environment: http://bit.ly/2lzSQ8f

Hi Jose,

This is a great question, as (in my opinion) project management is (next to change management) currently the most promising area to apply gamification. Especially, if we are talking about complex projects.

The main reasons:
- Projects are everywhere. And many (large) projects fail (http://bit.ly/2lEIEeY)
- Project success depends on engaged agents that contribute to the project.
- If projects are complex, they cannot be managed top-down.

Gamification, if done well, is an approach to control/trigger behavior and attention by designing a context that allows agents to focus on what is relevant. This enables self-organization and takes the burden of "managing" a project away from the manager (who cannot "manage" a complex project anyway).

The core 'ingredient' of a gamified system are the feedback mechanisms it implements. Timely and accurate feedback, including an appropriate visualization, shows the agents where they stand. In order to work in a project context, relevant KPIs are crucial. Defining the right indicators to observe is where the experience and knowledge of management come into play.

Another crucial element is the scope of decision-making powers of the agents. As relevant information in a complex project is distributed, a major advantage of gamification would be to motivate everybody to contribute their knowledge and insights. Again, designing a context that promotes self-organized information gathering and sharing (instead of using centralized reporting systems) would increase performance and relieve management at the same time.

Many tools that implement game design thinking, from Kanban boards to planning poker, are already being used in the context of agile project management. For more complex tasks, gamification mechanisms like prediction markets are powerful tools to help manage projects "by design".