Gamification Key Update #1
I have partitioned my team into three departments each tackling their respective operational area: test management, regression and automation team, and performance test team. We’re making great progress with the performance test team and very little on the rest. Let’s think about this for a bit.
1. Gamification Takes Time
Not just in the philosophical sense that people or the organization need to warm up to the idea, but also literal work hours to be allocated in such activity. The performance test team has made strides in their contribution to the documentation gamification and is on track to baseline its revised ways of working by the end of October 2021.
2. The Sum is Greater than the Parts
I originally intended to measure the individual performance of the team – not to pit them against each other – but to track their individual growth over time ala performance graphs.
However, I am getting more joy with a collective goal rather than individual metrics. Instead of tracking articles written by individuals, I am tracking sections in the curriculum covered by the group. Recalibrated for performance test team, now to deploy it on the other teams.
3. Beware the Call of Kaizen
The initial goal of my Gamification exercise was to standardise processes, knowledge and documents used/produced by the team. It still is but now that I have had more time to plot out the next 12 months, the vision has expanded in the form of a trilogy.
Episode 1 – Documentation of Existing Processes, Assets and IPs (We want to ensure we have a baseline understanding of what we do with what we do by the end of this year.)
Episode 2 – Business Process Reengineering (It’s a cliché term but that’s the prerequisite for any team that needs to maintain its relevance in the industry. I need to find ways to recover time not just for my customers but for my team as well by streamlining operations.)
Episode 3 – Industrial Competitiveness (Does my team stand a chance to get hired in other companies? The answer has to be yes. We can’t afford to not have industry class operations. We should have established that we are good for the current organisation in the previous episodes, this is the episode to blow things out of good proportion.)
