PROJECT MANAGEMENT

USING GAMIFICATION
 Abstract

Gamification is about using game design elements in various non-game contexts. Originally started in the marketing
industry, it is applied in many different settings nowadays.

Project management is a growing discipline and considered a critical function by many of today’s companies.
Academics and organizations continuously seek new methodologies, concepts, ideas, and tools that can improve
how project is managed to ensure project success.

The use of gamification tools and methods has the potential to benefit project managers from all industries because
of their fundamental potential to shape and influence behaviour. It is important for project professionals to fully
understand the concept, how it could be applied to projects and the associated benefits or risks, if its transition to
project management is to be successful.
 Table of Contents
AN INTRODUCTION TO GAMIFICATION ...................................................................................................................................................................................................... 5
GAMIFICATION POSITIVE IMPACTS ............................................................................................................................................................................................................ 6
GAMIFICATION FOR BUSINESS INNOVATION .............................................................................................................................................................................................. 7
GAME CONCEPTS....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 9
GAME ELEMENTS..................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 11
DYNAMICS ......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 12
MECHANICS......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................12
AESTHETICS ........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................ 13
GAMIFICATION DESIGN FRAMEWORK...................................................................................................................................................................................................... 15
DEFINE BUSINESS OBJECTIVES................................................................................................................................................................................................................................ 15
DELINEATE TARGET BEHAVIOURS ........................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 16
TARGET PLAYER PROFILE…………..........................................................................................................................................................................................................................16
ACTIVITY CYCLES .............................................................................................................................................................................................................................. …………………17
ENGAGEMENT LOOPS ........................................................................................................................................................................................................................ …………………18
DO NOT FORGET THE FUN ..................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 20
DEPLOY THE APPROPRIATE TOOLS .......................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 21
PROJECT MANAGEMENT.......................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 22
PROJECT MANAGEMENT PAIN ................................................................................................................................................................................................................ 24
GAMIFICATION IN THE CONTEXT OF PROJECT MANAGEMENT .................................................................................................................................................................. 25
MASLOW’S LAW OF HIERARCHY ............................................................................................................................................................................................................................ 26

BENEFITS OF GAMIFICATION FOR PROJECT MANAGEMENT ...................................................................................................................................................................... 29

PROPOSED SOLUTION FOR GAMIFIED PROJECT MANAGEMENT ................................................................................................................................................................ 31
GAMIFICATION TO IMPROVE EMPLOYEE PRODUCTIVITY .......................................................................................................................................................................... 32
GAMIFICATION TRAITS FOR EMPLOYER ................................................................................................................................................................................................... 33
CONCLUSION ........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 34
AN INTRODUCTION TO GAMIFICATION
“The concept of applying ‘game-design’ thinking to non-game applications to

make them more fun and engaging.”

Gamification is the concept of applying game mechanics and game design techniques to engage and motivate people to achieve their
goals. Gamification taps into the basic desires and needs of the users impulses which revolve around the idea of Status and
Achievement.

Gamification originates from the computer games industry. It is the use of game thinking and game mechanics in a non-game context in
order to engage users, solve problems and drive behavior. When used in a business environment, it is the Introduction process of
integrating game dynamics into a website, business service, online community, content portal or marketing campaign to initiate
participation and promote engagement.

On a basic level, gamification techniques taps into and influence

people’s natural desires for competition, achievement, recognition
and self-expression.

Software companies introduced the same kind of concepts into

work life that were being developed within their games. They
found that their employees responded positively to being awarded
‘badges’ depending on their performance or level of effort.
Gamification Positive Impacts – Success Stories

Domino’s Pizza: created the gaming app Autodesk: gamified the free trial, incentivizing 70% of Forbes Global 2000 companies have
Pizza Hero and increased sales revenue users to learn how to use the program and announced plans to deploy gamification for
by 30% by letting customers create their offering both in game and real word prizes, employee engagement to higher
own pizza with an app increasing trial usage by 54%, buy clicks by 15% productivity, & customer loyalty
and channel revenue by 29%

Ford Escape Route: with this game, SAP: The SAP Community Network regamified AstraZeneca: gamified medicine training
Ford’s customers bought over $8 million its already-mature reputation system, gets 97% of their large network of agents to
in vehicles, with 600% increased likes on increasing usage by 400% and community participate, with a 99% Completion Rate
FB page, and over 100 million feedback by 96%
impressions on Twitter

Keas: employment wellness program EMC RAMP: with their gamification platform, Microsoft: obtained 16x more feedback by
that increased employee engagement the company rewarded positive behaviour people through its Communicate Hope
with healthy activities by 10,000% from employees, partners and customers which gamified system
led to a 10% increase in documentation, 40%
more videos watched and 15% more
discussions
Gamification for Business Innovation
Gamification is a great way to increase motivation in service-based industry. Change of business in the form of innovation using gamification is
critical in competition and long-term survival. Innovation must be organised and distinct responsibilities must be designated. Innovation must
follow a strategy given that gamification will include several initiatives and investments.

“According to Gartner research, “more than half of the companies that manage the innovation process will gamify that process by 2015. “.

Getting people to collaborate in innovation has always been a challenge, and that’s where gamification provides an edge. When gamification is
used to crowdsource ideas, the role of the innovation team is to orchestrate innovation. They do that by designing innovation games that
provide the goals and simple rules to direct activities of the participants.
Innovation games engage people in an experience where they are quickly on-boarded
and given an opportunity to submit innovative ideas, or vote up and contribute to the
development of other people’s ideas. There is constant feedback to recognize their
contributions and to build their status in the innovation community.

Use of gamification methods, such as contests or rewards, employees an outlet

for their ideas and continue the process to help them organize support throughout
their journey towards innovation. If you start with a contest to choose the best idea,
you can get the whole team involved right from the start.

Once an idea has been chosen, employees can continue to participate by adding their own insights and foster cross-departmental collaboration.
The need for resources may present itself at this time, but by now the seed has been planted and the financial risk/reward is apparent.

By implementing employee engagement programs inside an office, one can get their employees to share their best ideas in a collaborative
fashion. Once this happens, there no limit to the business possibilities.
 Gamification improves innovation by motivating everyone to work better

Gamification aims to motivate everyone to work better. It’s not necessarily fun and it’s not only about the most active contributors.
Gamification helps to tap into the competitive nature of people, but doing it by increasing teamwork instead of pure competition.

 Gamification improves innovation by targeting and achieving each goals independently

Gamification splits the high level targets into smaller goals and engages users’ progress step by step.

 Digitally engage and motivate people to achieve goals

Gamification is the use of game mechanics and experience to digitally engage and motivate people to achieve their goals. If gamification
is not digitally implemented, it’s very difficult to measure or maintain.

That’s why gamification should be natural part of an organizations digital workplace.

Gamification Concept
In the recent time many modern applications of gamification (e.g., Microsoft- Ribbon Hero 2, Jive, Microsoft Share Point & CRM) focus
on providing rewards ( intrinsic & extrinsic) for behaviour through badges, levels, leaderboards, points & achievements, and. Using
rewards to change behavior can work in the short-term, but is problematic in the long-term. Once the rewards are removed, much of
the motivation can go away with it.

Gamification platform that focus on Badges, Leaderboards, Achievements, and Points will be referred as BLAP gamification for people
engagement.

 Badges - Badges symbolise an individual’s ability to perform and can be permanently attached to a player’s profile, serving
as a visible record of achievement They are often seen as long-term achievements, and are a determining factor for
maintaining the challenge within a gaming system. Gamification provides a method for displaying a person’s competencies so that
everyone is able to recognise an individual’s ability. It works in a similar way to the armed forces where badges showing
training undertaken, competency and responsibility are displayed on uniforms; ‘players’ within gamification can
also earn badges which are seen by the whole organisation and peer groups.

 Leader boards – The recognition that follows the collection of points and badges forms an important component of gamification.
Such recognition can be within the project team, peer group or could extend to senior management. One method of achieving this
recognition is through leader boards. By accumulating points or recognition and seeing these on a leader board, individuals can
advance ‘through the ranks’ and be recognised by their teammates. Create a public scoreboard where employees can see instant
performance results on an individual and team level, across the organization. This public display of achievement can help gentle,
healthy workplace competition.

 Achievements- Achievements are a virtual or physical representation of having accomplished something. Achievements can
be easy, difficult, surprising, funny, accomplished alone or as a group. Achievements are a way to give players a way to brag about
what they've done indirectly as well as add challenge and character to a game. Achievements are often considered "locked" until
you have met the series of tasks that are required to "unlock" the Achievement
  Points - It’s a great way to motivate people who are into collecting something. On the other hand points can be much more. The
using of points should be carefully considered because points are very limited, uniform and abstract. Points can however be a
great way to challenge the users by scores or reward the users by giving feedback of progression.

Badges, leader boards and Points can be a great starting point for gamifying, but they can also be very limited. Therefore a deeper look
into what makes games work is advisable.

Meaningful gamification is about using game elements to help participants find deeper meaning in a real-world setting. It uses strategic
points - Reflection, Exposition, Choice, Information, Play, and Engagement.

 Reflection – Reflection is creating opportunities for players to step back and think about their game based experiences. Reflection
creates the situation where a learner can connect what happened in the game with elements in his or her own life.

 Exposition – Creating stories for participants that are integrated with the real-world setting and allowing them to create their own. It
Present a narrative layer through game design elements. There are two important parts of exposition: the development of a
meaningful narrative element, and the presentation of that narrative element to the player.

 Choice –Developing systems that put the power in the hand of the participants. Taking this concept into gamification mean value that
the player has to be given choices about how he or she engages with the real-world setting and how winner is measured

 Information- Using game design and game display concepts to allow participants to learn more about the real-world context. People
have a more positive mental outlook when they feel they are gaining mastery in a topic area. As they learn more about the real-world
setting and the effect of their actions, they can reach the mastery desired by Self-Determination.

 Play – Facilitating freedom to explore and fail within boundaries. When playing, it is very common that a player will create a new
constraint under which to play; in fact, much fun can be found by adding constraints to something in life.

 Engagement- Encouraging participants to discover and learn from others interested in the real world setting. Engagements help in
implementing the difficulty of the challenges in the gamification system increases as the player’s skills and increase the player
engagement with the system.
Game Elements
In game design the Mechanics-Dynamics-Aesthetics (MDA) framework is a tool used to analyze games. The MDA
framework formalizes the consumption of games by breaking them into their distinct components.

The MDA framework helps to influence the player's experience

and application properties that both make games engaging and
motivate people to achieve their goals.

Progres
sion
Rule System Fun

Design Counterpart Aesthetics

Feedba
ck

Mechanics Dynamics Aesthetics

Badges

Game elements Hierarchy

Mechanics
Mechanics are the agents, objects, elements and their relationships in the game. Mechanics are the rules of the game, and are what the
game designer has the most control over, and interacts with most often. They define the game as a rule-based system, specifying what
there is, how everything behaves, and how the player can interact with the game world.

Mechanics
Challenges – objectives to reach Resource acquisition
Chance Rewards
Competition Transactions
Cooperation Turns

Dynamics
Dynamics is behavior of the game as a system — what happens when you play? How can we predict what happens when you play?
Game dynamics is about predicting and explaining. Game Dynamics define how the rules act in motion, responding to player input and
working in concert with other rules. In programming terms, the “run-time” behaviour of the game

Dynamics
Achievements Discovery
Emotional reinforcement Points
Discovery Progression
Progression Status
Aesthetics
Aesthetics describes the desirable emotional responses evoked in the player, when player interacts with the game system.
Aesthetics are usually objects that the player is able to manipulate in the course of the game. Aesthetics provide a source of
identification for the player, usually in the shape of possessions, resources, and/or representatives (characters/pieces).
The components of Aesthetics as follows:
1. Sensation - Game as sense-pleasure 5. Fellowship - Game as social framework

2. Fantasy - Game as make-believe 6. Discovery - Game as uncharted territory

3. Narrative - Game as drama 7. Expression - Game as self-discovery

4. Challenge - Game as obstacle course 8. Submission - Game as pastime

Aesthetics
Achievements Leader boards
Avatars Levels
Badges Points
Boss fights Quests
Collections Social graph
Combat Teams
Content unlocking Virtual goods
Achievements Leader boards
Gifting
Gamification Framework
Gamification Design Framework
For designing gamified applications a multidisciplinary approach is necessary. While it is about fun, play and user experience, it is also
about engineering the business objectives and facing them through those features. The gamification frameworks are the set of pre-
established procedures that serve to gamify a process. In other words, a framework provides us a previously tested pattern that will
allow us to gamify a process with greater guarantees of success. The model for designing gamified applications includes the following
steps.

1. Define Business objectives

a) What is the business objective that the organization is trying to achieve using gamification?
b) How should Gamification benefit the organisation?
c) What’s the ultimate business goal?

Before a gamified system is designed, the following question should be answered: How should Gamification benefit the organisation?

Examples of business objectives are:

 Employee adoption and mastery of new skills/technologies.
 Employee motivation
 Employee collaboration
 Employee retention
 Productivity improvement.
 Customer satisfaction
 Drive competition
2. Delineate target behaviours
The second step in the Gamification Design Framework is delineating the target behaviour that’s necessary to achieve the objectives
that have been set. Most business objectives can be divided in several forms of target behaviour.
What behaviour is expected of players?
What behaviour should be rewarded?
What do you want your players to do?
What are the metrics that will allow you to measure them?

3. Target Player Profiles

Who are the people who will be participating in your gamified activity? Players can be described using demographics (such as age and
gender), Psychographics (such as their values and personalities), Bartle’s player types, or some other framework. You should show that
you understand what Sorts of game elements and other structures are likely to be effective for this population

Killers Achievers
Defined by: Defined by:
A focus on winning, rank and A focus on attaining status
Player Type

direct peer to peer and achieving preset goals

competition quickly and /or completely.
Engaged by: Engaged by:
Leaderboards Ranks Achievements

Socialites Explorers
Defined by:
Defined by:
A focus on socializing and a
A focus on exploring and a drive
drive to develop a network of
to discover the unknown.
friends and contacts.
Engaged by:
Engaged by:
Obfuscated Achievements
Newsfeeds, Friends Lists, Chats
.
 Context
In the context phase the designer gathers data in the workplace while people are working and focuses on what they are doing.

 Partnership
In this phase the designer collaborates with customers to understand their work and lets them lead the interview by doing their work.
The designer shouldn’t have planned questions for the partnership phase.

 Interpretation

The designer determines the meaning of the customer’s words and actions together with the customer by sharing interpretations and
lets them tune the meanings. When immersed in their real life and real work, people will not let you misconstrue their lives.

4. Activity Cycles
Activity cycles in games means the loop, which happens between fighting, earning and buying. Explore in greater detail how you will
motivate your players using engagement and progression loops.

a) First, describe the kinds of feedback your system will offer the players to encourage further action, and explain how this
feedback will work to motivate the players. (Remember: rewards are only one kind of feedback.)
b) Second, how if at all will players progress in your system? This includes how the system will get new players engaged, and how
it will remain interesting for more experienced players.
Engagement is one of the most important benefits of Gamification, yet also something that’s very hard to achieve. Some things should
be taken into account when designing for engagement:
Engagement loops
To get people to play a game or enter a gamified system once is one thing, but to keep them interested over a long period of time is
something else. To achieve this, a gamified system should have engagement loops. These encourage reward players when specific
behaviour is shown and encourage them to keep showing
this behavior time and time again.
Motivations
An engagement loop exists of 3 components and can be (ex: desire for status, access,
repeated endlessly. power, stuff, altruism, and self-
That reinforce expression) Drive consumer
1. Motivation to complete
2. Action
3. Feedback Achievements Action
(ex: badges, trophies, exclusive
(ex: Upload content, share on
 Onboarding and progression loops content, name on a
leaderboards) Facebook, complete a survey,
watch an advertisements)

a) Onboarding

Most people don’t exactly know how a game works when

Which earn Rewards that are
they play it for the first time. By explaining the most incentivized by
important elements and concepts of the game at the start, players (ex: virtual goods, progress)
the player is sufficiently equipped to play the game to
satisfaction.

Onboarding is often done by having the player carry out small assignments like creating / updating a profile, looking up something in the
help section or using specific tools in the game. By having the player experience how everything works step by step, it’s prevented that
the player quits the game before he has really started playing.
 b) Progression loops

Understanding the basics of a game isn’t enough to defeat the final boss. The challenge of an end boss is too big for a beginner and
would only work discouraging.
Progression loops are steps in difficulty that are just small enough for the player to overcome, but big enough to be perceived as a real
challenge.

Game Progression Structure

5. Do not forget the fun
This thesis will approach the user experience as four groups of fun: hard fun, serious
fun, people fun and easy fun.

Hard fun -Emotions from meaningful challenges, strategies, and puzzles

Hard fun means the kind of fun that includes challenges, easy fun means exploring,
people fun means collaboration with other people in a way or another and serious
fun means the kind of fun that changes how the player thinks or feels in real life.

.
Easy fun -Grab attention with ambiguity, incompleteness, and detail
Easy fun is all about discovering the game world. It responds to the players’ curiosity. The attention is held by feelings of wonder, awe and
mystery.

Serious fun (Altered states) -Generate emotion with perception, thought, behaviour, and other people
When one of the major reasons to play a game is the way the game makes a player feel inside, we’re talking about serious fun. Players
have a certain goal when playing the game, varying from ‘blowing of steam after work’, to ‘feeling better about myself’. A lot of games
have a certain amount of serious fun in them, but in MMOG’s (Massively Multiplayer Online Games) this is a very important element
because of the social complexity in these games.
Serious fun is usually seen in an educational context such as games where the learning happens through repetitive player tasks

People fun -Create opportunities for player competition, cooperation, performance, and spectacle
For a lot of players gaming is about playing with others. Cooperation and competition are important emotions which make people continue
playing a game. Players that find this important, see games primarily as tools for social interaction.
6. Deploy the appropriate tools
Deploying the right tools means the implementation of the application. The final outcome will not be an application but the final
Concepting includes the following methods:

Brainstorming
A collective process of generating constraint-free ideas that respond to a given creative brief.

User flows
A visual representation of the user’s flow to complete tasks within the product.

Wireframe
A visual guide that represents the page structure, as well as it is hierarchy and key elements

Mockup
A model or replica of a machine or structure, used for instructional or experimental purposes.

Benchmarking
Evaluate or check (something) by comparison with a standard

Concepting
An idea of something formed by mentally combining
Gamified Project Management
Project management
Project management is the process and activity of planning, organizing, motivating, and controlling resources, procedures and protocols
to achieve specific goals in scientific or daily problems. A project is a temporary endeavor designed to produce a unique product, service
or result with a defined beginning and end (usually time-constrained, and often constrained by funding or deliverables),undertaken to
meet unique goals and objectives, typically to bring about beneficial change or added value.

The temporary nature of projects stands in contrast with business as usual (or operations), which are repetitive, permanent, or semi-
permanent functional activities to produce products or services. In practice, the management of these two systems is often quite
different, and as such requires the development of distinct technical skills and management strategies.

The primary challenge of project management is to achieve all of the project goals and objectives while honoring the preconceived
constraints. The primary constraints are scope, time, quality and budget. The secondary — and more ambitious — challenge is to
optimize the allocation of necessary inputs and integrate them to meet pre-defined objectives.
Project management pain Areas

 Inadequate Analysis  Blocked Team

 Poor Planning  Erroneous Estimates

 Frazzled Product Champion  Traveling Stories

 Bulging Backlog  Accountability

 Follow-up  Consolidation

 Evaluation  Visibility

 Feedback
Gamification in the context of Project Management
Projects and games share some noticeable traits. Games are usually driven by coherent goals, well-defined player roles and meaningful
metrics in order to provide feedback on progression. Similarly, well-managed projects are guided by cogent objectives, team members
have delineated roles and intelligent metrics that are employed to measure progress. The significant difference between the two lies in
gaming feedback, which is transparent, instantaneous and public.

Gamification encompasses many elements that could be utilized successfully within a project management environment to create
fun, motivate staff and increase productivity within project teams. The principles of gamification are based around the ability to help
create and sustain relationships between the user (employee) and a product (the project). The use of engaging and entertaining
games/activities as an addition to the working environment are designed to resonate and entice both gamers and those not interested
in typical gaming practices.

Gamification has the potential to create a sense of community within a project or organisation, which in turn should inspire engaged
users to contribute at a much higher level due to camaraderie and an increased sense of loyalty. Individual project team members would
be encouraged by the accountable goals and the clear recognition and reward policy. Gamification could be an important tool to assist
the project manager in understanding what the team has to do, as well as enabling the team to fully understand the manager’s
expectations and requirements.

Gamification in itself does not add any measurable value to a project or organisation. It is in peoples’ enhanced commitment and
engagement with a project and through the development of key emotions such as loyalty, pride, a strong work ethic and
willingness to win, that the real benefits of gaming can be understood.

Project management is highly about people. It deals with guiding of people psychologically, dealing with interpersonal issues, and
getting frequent, unwarranted updates about people’s personal lives.
Motivation is a critical factor in project management. The probability of project success can be directly related on how well a project
manager can motivate team members. Rewards are one means to stimulate employee motivation. In gamified project cash and non-
cash rewards equally can have a motivating effect on project team members if properly utilized. Gamification utilizes rewards to create
motivation for work tasks performed.

Interacting with people for updates, follow-ups, and information presentation is incredibly important to a project manager. This all
comes to the idea that the motivation of people to perform at a job is closely tied to their personal desires and feelings. Gamification
draws heavily upon Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and the feedback loop. The feedback loop is based on the idea that the information you
take in motivates the actions you will take.

Maslow’s Law of Hierarchy

Maslow’s hierarchy depicts levels of self that one can be placed at. The concept is that a project manager should attempt to take all
employees and get them to the top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, which is self-actualization. This means that they need to feel that
they belong, are safe, have their needs met, and believe that they have a reputation within the organization.

One use for gamification is to use it as a method of working employees up these

levels of needs. This ties in directly with the previously defined concept of
creating needed feedback through implemented mechanics. It also has ties
to encouragement of a particular behavior.
Gamification techniques tap into that – the idea of leaderboards, badges, and levels.”

While these are three very specific game mechanics that she has touched on, the concept of “social triggers” in a workplace has a high
ability of creating motivation through engagement of the worker

Four gamified mechanics items used for driving employee engagement and excitement:

 Acceleration of Feedback Cycles

 Use of Clear Goals / Rules of Play
 Allow Player Empowerment to Achieve Goals
 Narrative Building to Engage Players

What can be seen with these four concepts is the defined, repeatable process of removing boredom and monotony from a task by
encouraging a worker’s personal desire to achieve a goal and feel accomplished. It is important to note here, though, that these
concepts are taking advantage of human nature and using it to achieve business goals. This raises some potentially ethical issues but it
will be discussed in more depth later under the section on criticisms.

Lastly, the gamification implementation must be simple and enjoyable. To plan properly is to understand the relationship between the
mechanics themselves and the users of these mechanics.

The mechanics should not be distracting and should attempt to enhance the overall experience instead of focusing on the end-goal
achievement. This requires that the overall process become enjoyable.
Obviously, people will not engage in an activity if it is not something that can be enjoyed. A person “plays” a game, so that is what the
worker should be doing as well, or at least that should be the goal in the attempt to achieve gamification in a project.

The hope is to get the workers to “play” at performing their work tasks so that they truly enjoy doing the necessary tasks instead of
feeling obligated to do so.
Benefits of gamification

 Increasing productivity, as people stay at their tasks for longer because they are more fun
 Improving morale, as people like social recognition, collecting ‘likes’ etc
 Increasing quality of service, through gamification techniques
 Increasing employee retention, because life at work is nice environment
 Gamification for collecting data Gamification makes sense from a business perspective as well as an employee engagement
perspective & data leads to better decisions.
 Creating an exciting work environment, because we all like to work somewhere exciting!
 Drive Profit
 Reduce Time, Costs
 Drive Adoption Learning, Loyalty

If you use gamification features on your online Project management tool, you can encourage people to enter their project reports, task
Updates and so on.

Anything that encourages people to use the product has to be a good thing, as often software implementations fail not because the
software is no good but because people prefer to work outside it.

“In short, gamification makes sense from a business perspective as well as an employee engagement perspective. “
Benefits of Gamification for Project Management
Gamification has a potential market in assisting project teams to deliver quality software that exceeds customer expectations and meets
their business objectives. As such, it is a tool to enable enhanced collaboration, communication and knowledge capture and retention.

 Employee adoption and mastery of new skills/technologies: Developers will be skilled and masterful in new technologies along
with defined processes during the gamification run. The drive to master new skills is an essential motivator for employees and
improves their engagement.

 Employee motivation: Running gamification contests improves employee motivation and will be seen as a talent recognition tool.

 Employee collaboration: Gamification helps team members stay connected with others in the team and be more sociable.

 Employee retention: Announce attractive rewards and a recognition program that encourages and motivates employees to attain
business goals. This increases the chance to retain employees.

 Rewards and recognition: It gives employees greater motivation as they receive appreciation, respect, rewards and recognition
throughout the gamification contest.

 Track progress and feedback: Gamification allows employees to keep track of their progress and obtain real-time feedback.
Understanding employee expertise is crucial for a company to build a passionate team and maximize value for both employees
and the organization.

 Productivity improvement: Improve consistency and quality by providing real-time feedback and metrics on performance versus
benchmarks and let employees know how their efforts compare to their past performance.

 Customer satisfaction: Gamification can improve the quality of customer care. When employees are engaged and committed,
their quality of work improves.
 Drive competition: Create healthy competition and collaboration among employees in a scalable and automated way to drive
repeatable results.
Gamified Proposed Solution
Proposed Solution for Gamified project Management
Gamification to Improve Employee Productivity
1. Keep Everything Measurable: Gamification programs should always be designed to increase a specific metric, whether that’s
leads per month or employee satisfaction. Placing measurable results at the heart of your gamification goals will make it much
easier to determine the success or failure of your program.

2. Provide Good Feedback: Accelerating feedback is one of the main ways gamification will help increase that metric we just talked
about. By accelerating the feedback mechanism, you speed up the rate of adoption for new behavior. This helps you accomplish
your goals faster.

3. Develop a Sense of Completion: Employees that always feel behind at work often lose motivation. By dividing a large goal into a
series of tasks which can each be completed, employees will feel, and be, more productive.

4. Accelerate Employee Development: Gamification platform takes your learning software or platform and adds game mechanics
into it to improve employees' digital experience. By applying the same notions that inspire people to play games – achievements,
status and rewards – your workforce will put learning and collaboration at the top of their priorities.

5. Retain and engage Service & Support Employees: Your support service has to provide a great experience to your customers. If
your service and support teams suffer from a high turnover and a lack of motivation, your customers will know it. So it is a great
challenge for any company to deeper engage and retains service and support teams.
6. Improve Key performance Indicators: By tracking employee activities and responses to incentives, gamification helps to make
real measurable improvements to your KPIs.

 Reduce call times

 Raise customer satisfaction rates
 Accelerate onboarding time and time to achieve product mastery
 Drive traffic and activity in portals and enterprise software
Gamification Traits for Employer

1 Senior leadership must articulate a clear vision to all employees

Employees should be encouraged to communicate openly and influence the company’s vision
2 through their input.

3
Direct manager should foster healthy relationship with their employees.

4 Senior leadership should continuously demonstrate that employees have an impact on their work
environment.

5
Managers should show employees that they are valued as true contributors them sense of
empowerment.
Conclusion - The Way Ahead
Gamification is about evolving from mere games to developing a gaming framework for businesses to achieve their goals in a
competitive world. Incorporating Gamification within the corporate system can be beneficial. Within the sphere of enterprise
applications, Gamification aims to achieve higher productivity levels to drive more benefits.

Gamification has the potential to enhance our everyday experience and has already been applied to different aspects of our daily life,
such as education, IT, media and healthcare. Yet, there is immense potential for future applications and future research, such as mobile
app development for customer engagement. Gamification has opened new opportunities for improvements for better user experience
and continues to thrill the senses.

Careful design and implementation can lead to Gamification in technology, service, product, or community which will drive participation,
reward commitment and a sense of connection with users and customers. Its mechanics are transparent and allows each
communication between management and employees. This visibility allows for a full understanding of the system being set into place
that dictates that there are enjoyable benefits, both physical and virtual, that can be gained in exchange for hard work and
achievements.
Various positive outcomes are expected due to the integration of gamification mechanisms into the design of the project Management
system. It is visible, at this point, what gamification truly is. In regards to project management, it is a means to elicit higher productivity
from workers based on the agreement that the workers are willing to perform at higher productivity levels to achieve benefits. It has
been shown that there are many gamification concepts that can be potentially utilized including quests, levels, and achievements. These
concepts, or mechanics as they have been properly called, are techniques that can increase the desire to work harder based on their
basic human nature.

On the negative side, criticisms have been detailed here that showcase the potential issues that can arise when gamification has not
been correctly planned out or implemented. These negatives can range from the ethical implications to an overabundance of
competitive atmosphere that eventually chokes off productivity instead of enhancing it.

In project management, one can easily see how important the concept of “people management” is. Gamification has the potential to
turn dull, boring work into a means to achieve something physical, such as a vacation or tickets to a sporting event, or metaphysical,
such as increasing the current level of the employee on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.