Seems like everybody wants to gamify everything these days. Far be it for me to not jump on this bandwagon as well :-).
When properly harnessed, adding game mechanics to certain processes can make them more fun, engage the team performing them and increase the productivity and quality of output from that team. As we continue to evolve our Agile practices, we’ve experimented with some game mechanics to see what, if anything, is effective in increasing our velocity as well as the quality of our work. In the inaugural post of this series, I’d like to show you how aging your feature cards can help your team focus and unblock itself.
Card aging consists of physically indicating on each card how “old” it is. Age is determined by each day that the card is in-flight. At TheLadders we age our cards quite literally. On day one the card is a baby and is awarded the baby magnet.
With each additional day in-flight, a new avatar is assigned to the card. The card “ages” from baby, to boy, to man, to old man finally, death.
The switching of the avatar happens every morning at our stand-up marking a very explicit transition. The team members assigned to that card, while not called out explicitly, become keenly aware that their card is still in the in-flight column. At a certain point, the scrum master or dev manager begins to notice that a card is aging and will jump in to see what can be done to move the team forward.
In this way, card aging serves as a daily reminder of how quickly the team is moving forward. If the board is full of babies, we’re in good shape. As the avatar population ages, however, it becomes evident that the team needs to focus more. The goal is to avoid the “death” avatar. If a card “dies” on the board it becomes the top priority to move through and other developers may be pulled over to help unblock that issue.
An additional incentive for us to stay out of the “death” phase is a counter we’ve placed on our board that mimics the accident safety records of physical production facilities. Our goal is always to increase the “days without death” count. It’s actually quite disheartening when that number gets reset to zero.
Card aging has worked well for us as a technique to focus the team and make it aware of issues before they arise. The addition of a counter has helped make this focus top of mind and motivates the team daily to keep that number high. Do you think this type of technique would work well for your team? Do you already do something like this? Leave a note in the comments.
[Jeff]
I think that’s a great idea! I think the only caveat to trying this is that your cards need to be all roughly the same size in terms of effort, otherwise the gamification could also be gamed!