Boost Your Agile Transformation with Innovative Scrum Gamification

Gamification is the concept of adding gaming principles to non-gaming environments to increase participation. It is an attempt to create an environment that influences team members’ behaviors and improves productivity and engagement. The participants experience joy and motivation while playing games.

According to a study by Tech Report, gamification improved productivity and engagement. Below is their analysis.

• 90% of the employees report increased productivity when game-like elements are integrated into their tasks.
• 61% of the employees undergoing gamified training find the process fun, interactive, and more effective.
• The benefits of gamification extend to employee well-being, with an 89% surge in employee happiness reported.
• Gamified learning engages about 30% more employees than traditional methods.

Would you not love to apply gaming concepts in the workplace – Agile gamification is not jargon.

Agile transformations are never easy. The hardest part will be changing team members’ mindsets, from the simple task of joining meetings on time to becoming self-managed and high-performing teams. It is not easy to change behaviors and have all roles talk in scrum meetings. Scrum masters can use gamification in a fun, engaging, and non-assertive way to achieve agility.

How should the team get started?

Introduce the concept of gamification – Once the team is versed in Agile fundamentals, explain how they form the basis for gamification. Emphasize how gamification helps motivate the team and foster healthy competition by promoting a sense of achievement. Describe how mundane ceremonies can be interesting by explaining a few games that can be played in each ceremony.

Set Expectations – Like any other game, set the right expectations and highlight how essential it is to follow the process to improve productivity by adhering to scrum values and principles for the games we decided to play.

Visualize progress – Introduce the concept of visual boards that portray real progress toward the shared goal and highlight blockers. The board serves as an element of gamification, as we let the teams create a game-like interface by adding avatars, giving a team name, and displaying progress bars and rewards.

Appreciation and Rewards – Appreciation is the key to success! It is important to recognize the team for every small and valuable task accomplished. Appreciation can be verbal or in the form of rewards like badges, points, or emails.

How do we gamify scrum ceremonies to make them interesting?

Sprint Planning

• Allow the team to comprehend the scope of work and create a shared understanding of the goal.
• Let them identify the stories from the backlog contributing to achieving the goal.
• Encourage time-boxed challenges to evaluate tasks and reward with goodies if estimated accurately within a stipulated time.

Daily Stand-up

Time-boxing is a challenge in this ceremony. For gamifying standups, set up interesting team names and a timer for each member to share updates. Reward teams that consistently finish the stand-up in 15 minutes throughout the sprint or the participants who provide updates within the time limit. We can leverage avatars for each team member and have them share updates creatively. Do not forget to appreciate the team for their accomplishments.

Sprint Review

Sprint reviews are confidence boosters! Stakeholder acceptance of built features enables the team to develop quality products in the next sprints; hence, it is important to engage stakeholders. The best ways to involve them is to –

• Allow them to experiment with the product as the team describes it.
• Set up a polling mechanism and have them vote on how they feel about the increments demonstrated. Discuss poorly rated increments.
• For further gaming effects, encourage participants to share feedback on the overall meeting by sending Happy, Neutral, and Sad emoticons and explaining their selection.

Sprint Retrospective

It is a good idea to start retrospectives with small activities, which will make it easy for the team to start talking. Use questions or tasks that are simple to answer. It can be as simple as “Which is your favorite season? Or paste a picture of your favorite food. With this, the team gets motivated to participate in retrospectives. When a team gets comfortable, use the methods below to capture the sprint experiences.

Ex: Fast & Furious – The facilitator asks the team to share observations that fall under these categories in the sprint –

• Fast: What went fast?
• Furious: What made you furious?
• Funny: Things that were funny?
• First: What did you experience the first time?
• Fed up: What annoyed you and want to get rid of?

Sailboat

It’s a retro where the team imagines sailing towards a beautiful destination (Sprint goal), should have encountered barriers like rocks (Risks and impediments), identified other factors that may have slowed down the progress (Anchors), and things that helped to achieve goals faster (Wind).

Conclusion

It is vital to think creatively and make the scrum events enjoyable, which will, in turn, boost productivity and collaboration. Be mindful of not creating an unhealthy environment, which may lead to distractions and less focus on delivering value to customers.

Introducing gaming concepts to scrum ceremonies helped create a shared understanding of the goals via sprint planning, bring stakeholders’ overall progress visibility using interactive sprint reviews, overcome challenges by empowering teams to highlight them in daily stand-ups, and promote continuous improvements through our effective and funny retrospectives.

Cigniti leverages the homegrown Process Accelerator platform (PRAXIA), which has 200+ reusable assets specific to support Agile advisory and transformation services, including playbooks and gamification techniques. These gamifying elements and PRAXIA created an environment of joy that enabled active participation in scrum events, promoting creativity and innovation.

Need help? Contact our Advisory and Transformation experts to boost your Agile Transformation with innovative Scrum Gamification.