#redcritter

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The Gamification of Project Management

Project management (PM) can be both detailed and boring. No one says “Wow I need to look at my PM dashboard, it is so exciting!” That is why building game mechanics into RedCritter’s Tracker can make the boring more palatable.  Now most of the PMI certified project manager will hate me, but a few may just think this might be the right approach.

I had a follow-on briefing with Bill Rodgers recently, the CRO at RedCritter and one of its founders. Dave Gardner (another CSI Analyst) and I originally met Bill at the Gamification Summit a few weeks ago.  One of the other analysts here (Dave Gardner) was also on the call, and I also got some feedback on RedCritter from another trusted source.Although I have access to the tool, I have not yet had time to play with it (but I will). Tracker was originally set up to support agile development for project development teams, you can change the text labels and easily create templates that will allow it to work on any type of project.

The new version of BaseCamp, Pivotal Tracker and Rally all offer more features, but more is not necessarily bette!.  As a matter of fact I advise lots of my collaboration vendor clients to make the product simpler and easy to use, as that was the most popular feature the last time we did a survey on collaborative feature popularity. Easy is defined by me “as being able to do anything in the product with 1-2 clicks.”  This drives developers crazy, as it is much easier for them to add a feature, than it is to make a tool easy to use. I don’t only mean making a better UI, but thinking through the whole tool, navigation, displays, use cases, etc. I believe you have to start out with the “easy” goal in mind; it is not something you can bolt on later. 

by David Coleman, MD of Collaborative Strategies

Read more

 A game called Cosmic Clean made for Phillips by Matmi on Red Critter

► We have been using this software for getting on a year now and have found it to be a great success. It's quite amusing to hear the developers in the background compete for points. If you are looking for an agile based project management tool with a twist, I recomend you check it out.

Related articles:

San Francisco!

Merit Badges: How Salesforce Motivates a Workforce

RedCritter Tracker: Motivation by Gamification

RedCritter Tracker – Gamifying the Work place

Playing with Project Management - RedCritter Tracker

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San Francisco!

Matmi jet setters James and Jeff were invited to attend the San Francisco Gamification Summit by our friends from RedCritter last week – we would like say a BIG thanks to Mike and Erika for looking after them and making it all possible, it was a great opportunity for Matmi to meet some of the big players in digital and do some serious Stateside networking with Sega, Unity and Microsoft.

The team at RedCritter invited Jeff to speak at the GSummit 2012, to discuss his thoughts and experiences with their brilliant gamified project management tool. We have been using RedCritter with great success internally for some time (see blog post) – so it was great to finally put faces to names and meet the guys who are behind this software, as well as checking out their newest ideas and meeting some great other companies and people in the industry.

Here are a few words from the big cheese himself about his State side experience:

“James and I really enjoyed our trip to San Francisco. It felt like a place of great opportunity, and it was brilliant to meet some of the brands we have always admired.

We loved visiting the SEGA offices, it was fantastic to meet the Sonic & Monkey ball team in person, we look forward to working with them soon. We also visited Unity3D headquarters and I’d like to thank Tracy who has been helping us with our latest projects; they seemed pretty impressed with what we had to show them and its been a great pleasure to work together. If you don’t use Unity3D to make games yet - you should!

The Gamification Summit was fab – there are some brilliant new companies and products entering the digital space. The USA seem to be leading the way in gamification; we met Bunchball, Big Door, Badgeville, Gabe Zichermann (author of “Gamification by Design) along with the head of start up’s at Microsoft who was really excited by the Red Critter software, as well as the work Matmi has produced. Amazing!

We bumped into the famed US rapper Chamionillaire, who has been working with Big Door, and offered to make him a Matmi game, watch this space...

I’d like to say a big thanks to everyone we met with over in San Francisco I hope this is the first of many trips, and the beginning of some great new creative partnerships!”

Jeff Coghlan, CEO

Finally, next week Jeff is speaking at the Develop Conference in Brighton; we are really excited about this and hope to make it a talk with a bit of a twist...

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Merit Badges: How Salesforce Motivates a Workforce

Here's a very serious question: Are the tools your company's employees use to do their job more or less motivating to that end than the apps, games, and social services they use to do something other than their job? Put another way, does the software your people use for play improve the quality of their work, more than the software they use for work?

This is a question that a company called Rypple first started tackling three years ago. Identifying what Rypple was, was evidently hard enough - in 2009, ReadWriteWeb called it an enterprise solution for garnering feedback; two years later, we re-introduced it as a tool for rewarding employees for good performance. Both were partly right. Fortunately for Rypple, Salesforce perceived it as something substantially greater, and today Rypple is being re-reintroduced as the latest cloud-based component in the Force.com arsenal.

Read the full article ► via ReadWriteWeb

►Mini Matmian:

We are no strangers to the gamifying of the work place (we use a great piece of kit for software development called RedCritter Tracker) and from our experience it can certainly be a great motivational device. 

There are pitfalls to watch out for and you need to carefully analyse whether it would be right for your business but, if implemented effectively, it is a great tool for rewarding employees for good performance.

Check out Matmi's experience with RedCritter Tracker.

What are your thoughts on adding Gamification to the work-place?

  Magic Across Media...

http://www.matmi.com/contact.php

[email protected]

Phone: [phone]

Twitter: @matmi

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/Matmi

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RedCritter Tracker: Motivation by Gamification

Many companies opt to use incentive or reward programs in order to motivate staff and increase sales or work done. Wouldn’t it be awesome to not only have an online incentive/rewards program but mix it in with some Foursquare-style gamification for a conceptually awesome motivation tool?

That’s what RedCritter Tracker might just be. RedCritter allows you to create new projects, invite your team and reward the completion of tasks. Users will earn points when they complete their tasks which can be spent in your own company rewards store and even earn badges! Trust me when I say that when I was told about the app, I was very excited to try it out.  

Via web.appstorm.net

You can also read Matmi's own experience with RedCritter Tracker here

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RedCritter Tracker – Gamifying the Work place

"It's not all just about the badges. Project leaders can assign points to individual tasks (depending on difficulty or time it takes to complete). These points can then be saved up and exchanged in the RedCritter Tracker store to treat yourself to a pressie. These rewards were voted for by the Matmi staff. Take a look at the kind of thing they aim to spend their hard earned points on (not ashamed to say they are very geek friendly)"   Read the full article here: orchard.co.uk

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Playing with Project Management - RedCritter Tracker

A startup called RedCritter turns software development into a game.

U.K.-based game development company Matmi began using Tracker a few months ago. While it's too early to tell if it's had a positive effect on the bottom line, the software has allowed more visibility into what programmers are actually doing. "Not only can we monitor how the project is going, and make amendments to hit deadlines should any issues arise, but [Tracker] allows the whole team to claim their involvement in the project and show them how important a part they play," says James Tibbles, head of development at Matmi. Via technologyreview.com