Gamification is a growing trend worldwide. It is the art of bringing games into work and engage teams to surpass their limits gradually. First, you create a gamification project. Next, you associate project goals to games, see your team engage and have fun. As a result, they will perform better.

In this Chapter, you will learn how to create your gamification program. You will meet the main GitScrum gamification feature – GitScrum Rock Star Team. Finally, know how to integrate other helpful GitScrum features into your gamification project.

Gamification Advantages and Key Factors

1. Team engagement:

Start a gamification project to create a challenge and use healthy competitiveness to motivate your team towards goals.

2. Assessment:

Use your gamification project to hold tasks, efforts and performance accountable. Identify your top performers and encourage all the team to improve constantly.

3. Recognition and Rewards:

Naturally, take simple but powerful actions to make team members feel recognized during gamification. Meanwhile, create gradual rewards according to their accomplishments.

4. Productivity:

See for yourself that productivity can be an agreeable topic, with the right features and a little fun.

GitScrum Rock Star Team Feature

GitScrum Rock Star is your gamification feature. It was developed for companies and teams to create motivation for individuals to surpass their own limits at work, in a playful way.

The intention of the gamification project is to reward the best performing collaborators, in the short and long term, with points and some kind of award, providing recognition to every positive goal accomplishment, celebrating results together.

To start gamefying your activities, you will need to create a gamification project.

Create your first Gamification Project with GitScrum and its Features

To make your gamification project work, be aware you will need to set up a few features to work together and meet your goals. In Chapter 6, you learned how to create GitScrum projects and customize your Workflow with workflow templates. In Chapter 8, you learned to customize other GitScrum features, like GitScrum Task Effort and GitScrum Task Type.

Now, you are about to use that knowledge and get some features working together in your gamification projects:
– RockStar Team will monitor and present your score of top performer team workers;
– Sprints will help you create weekly challenges with work tasks;
– Task Effort (and its templates) will help you attribute point values to each task team members accomplish;
– Task Type (and its templates) will help you organize the requests and sort the task efforts;
– Board will be your panel, as always, to manage the tasks workflow.

1. How to Create a Gamification Project on GitScrum:

1. Open your Workspace.
2. Click the (+) icon on the top bar.
3. Under the dropdown “Create” menu under (+), select “Project”.
4. At “Create new project”, select the “Gamification” type of project, and type your Project name.
5. Finally, click “Create new project” – keep (x) Private Project selected, unless you want to share it publicly.

2. Configure your Gamification Project on GitScrum

1. Start by defining your major working area to be associated with the gamification goals (Sales, or Development, for instance).
2. Click the Diamond icon to open GitScrum Marketplace and copy some important templates for the features you will  need:
   – Copy and apply a Workflow template;
   – Copy and apply a Task Effort template (and a compatible Task Type template, if you want to).
   Example: choose compatible templates for these features – Sales Workflow template and Sales Task Effort template, for example.
3. According to what you learned in Chapter 6, you can edit the templates you saved and customize them to your needs.
4. Go to Project Settings > Sidebar Macrofeatures and Project Settings.
5. Enable the features Task Effort, Task Type, Task Value, Sprints, RockStar Team, plus the extra ones you want to use.
6. Click “Update project.”

3. Start Working with your Gamification Project on GitScrum

After setting up the templates you will use (Workflow template, Task Effort, Task Type templates):

1. Go to Project Settings > Project Information.
2. Set your Project Goals – ex.: “Motivate the sales team to reach 30%+ monthly sales in 6 months”.
3. Click “Update project.”
4. On the Sidebar, click Board.
5. Create Tasks, set their Task Effort level, and assign them to each team member in your Workspace.
6. As a consequence, when team members accomplish the Tasks, GitScrum assigns the equivalent points to them.
7. You can click Sprints on the sidebar and create weekly Sprints with weekly goals, related to your gamification project.
   Click Chapter 10 to learn how to create a Sprint and include Tasks to it.
8. As long as team members accomplish the Tasks, they will gain points and show on a virtual podium.
9. On the Sidebar, click Rock Star Team to see the team’s present and final score.

Important: First, you must define short, mid-term and long-term rewards and forms of recognition for your gamification program. Secondly, use virtual/concrete rewards or mix both. Finally, project managers interact with the team and provide simple recognition messages to show they are attentive to the team’s dedication.

Examples of Gradual Rewards

• Virtual “claps”;
• Game points;
• Praise – a congratulation message (private or among the team);
• Public Recognition – showcasing team members’ contributions in your preferred platform;
• Awards and Rewards (the points can be worth awards and rewards by the end of your project).
  As you see, the gamification project does not have to be limited to your project management tool – this one is there to be your starting point.

Gamification Project Settings

Working with Task Effort and Rock Star Team in your Gamification Project

In the steps above you learned to set your Workflow Task Effort template and enable the Task Effort feature on Project Settings to use with your gamification project. As a result, you can create Tasks as usual on the Board and sort the Task Efforts:

1. On the Sidebar, click Board.
2. Create a Task using the (+) icon on the column you find appropriate – “To do”, for instance.
3. On the Task card, next to the Task status label and Task Type label, click the dropdown menu to select/determine the Effort Level of this Task and corresponding value in points.
4. Click the “person” icon to assign the Task to a team member.
5. When the team member completes the Task, he/she will gain its corresponding points to count for the final Rock Star Team score.

Working with Sprints and Rock Star Team in your Gamification Project

Gitscrum Sprints is a powerful feature to use with your gamification project. It allows you to create weekly challenges for your team, and you can create Sprints’ goals related to your gamification project’s goals.

In Chapter 10, you learned how to create and edit a Sprint and how to add Tasks to your Sprint.

When you create your Sprint, mention its goals – preferably SMART goals, to motivate your team to achieve them.

After the end of each Sprint, you can check with your team how well each of them did. See how many points they scored for the Tasks you included and sorted with Task Effort. Verify the Rock Star Team’s temporary scenario.

As you can see, GitScrum’s features work integrated to help your team deliver the best results.

To learn more, see some articles about Gamification on GitScrum Magazine.