Okay, good morning everybody, and welcome to our talk about Game of Plones and gamification. My name is Joerg. I'm from Interactive. We are a Cologne, Germany-based Plone service provider. We have 13 people organized in Scrum teams, and our main business is doing development

software development projects, mostly based on Plone. And before I jump into our topic of my talk, I would like to introduce Johanna. Johanna is Scrum Master at Interactive, and she prepared a little warm-up game for us.

Hi everybody, I'm Johanna, or you could call me Jojo or Yo-Yo, whatever, it's fine. And I prepared a little game to start the day, to wake up a little bit, and I would

like everybody to get up and come in front. And the first task of the game is for you to self-organize in two teams.

Yeah, so team one should be standing here, team two on this side, you should have the same size, group size, that would be great.

Okay, let's see. I would say this group is a bit bigger, so maybe one or two, go to the other team

please. Just another one, come over. Okay, so I prepared some paper and pens over there too. The next task would be to, each of you should write down one word that is overused

on your day-to-day work. It can be technical or in context of project management, words you use every day.

And then fold the paper together and put it in my beanies. Words you use on a day-to-day basis? Any word. Any word, work-related, it needs to be work-related.

So the word should be work-related, by the way, you can keep the pen if you want to.

Okay, so you are ready, you're finished? Okay, great.

Okay, you finished too? This is great, so we're going to switch the beanies, here you go. So, and now, each team has 90 seconds to explain the word.

So one of you goes to the beanie, picks one word and explains the word without mentioning any form of this word that's written down to your teammates. And they have to guess what it is.

And for each correct answer, your team gets a point. And after this 90 seconds, the other team has to do it. Okay? So this team starts right now.

Next one.

It's over.

So I guess you got six, right? Or was it seven? Six or seven? Okay. So now the other team, you can start now.

Over. Thank you very much. You can go to your seats. Wait, wait, wait. Okay. Bad decision.

Okay, so the intention of this game was to work on these words we overuse on a day-to-day

basis and to learn, relearn to define them. Because often it is we use words, we know them, because we use them every day, but our customers, they don't know what we're talking about. So that was a playful way to relearn definitions of some words.

Yeah. And that is one... Oh, sorry. Yeah. Sorry. Yeah. So we played this game, too.

And we were thinking about more ways how we could relearn or motivate our employers. And Joerg's going to talk about that more now. Okay. Thanks a lot.

Thanks for participating. So I think we had a little bit of fun, and at the same time we learned something. So we're in the middle of gamification. Maybe a couple of words how I came to this topic, why I'm interested in gamification. I said already that we are a project organization.

We're doing software development. We have scrum teams. And as a team lead, I often encounter challenges like how can I motivate a team over a longer period of time, for example? Or how can we effectively learn new skills, new techniques, new methods in our field

of work? Or how can we keep the team spirit high over a longer time? So I came across this buzzword, gamification, already a long time ago. And I read a lot of articles, mostly about bigger companies, what they did and how they

improved their performance in marketing and sales in software development with gamification. And I thought that could be something for us. And let's just try what we could do. So let's start with the question, what is gamification?

If you look at the Wikipedia definition, it's pretty simple. Gamification is the application of game design elements and game principles in non-game contexts. And non-game context for us is our business context, of course.

And so we wanted to see what we could do there in our business context. And actually, if I ask around, if you already came in contact with gamification, let me just do that. Who came in contact with gamification already?

Okay. So, yeah. Most hands or lots of hands went up, but I think every one of us already came into contact with gamification in some context. Mostly if you use your smartphone, if you have, for example, a fitness app, health tracking app or something, there are always elements of gamification in it.

You do something good, you get points for it, you get rewarded afterwards for what you did. And that's one of the main principles of gamification. So, in the characteristics in general of gamification are that you have a goal.

You have players who want and who need to reach this goal. And then you have rules. The rules of the game, they give this framework. They tell you how to reach the goal, what to do, what the steps are to be successful and to get your reward at the end. Then you have a feedback system normally, so that you as a player, you always know

where you are in the game and what you have to do, what's still ahead to reach your goal. So, constant feedback would be something very important. Then voluntary participation is a very important element of gamification.

So, you can never or you should never force somebody to participate in a game. It should always be voluntarily. And then, of course, there should be some desired outcome in the real world. It's not only about the game, like this little game we just did, it was not just

to have fun, that was one part of it, but the real goal, the goal in the real world was to learn about something of our work, like we wanted to explain those words. And last but not least, gamification should be embedded in the company culture.

Like, if your company culture is very strict and is not playful, gamification will probably not work. So, there must be a certain alignment between what you do and your culture. So, as I said, we are working in agile projects and mostly Scrum.

And in Scrum, we already came across gamification or it's already built-in in some sort in Scrum.

If you, for example, think of team estimation game or planning poker, those are games that are used to estimate your user stories, for example. So, it's already game elements in this agile approach.

And what you see here, these are pictures from one of our in-house Scrum trainings. And that was with Lego. We built together, we had teams and we built together little houses and the whole process was structured in the Scrum way. And we did the whole feedback cycle and everything with Lego.

So, that was the very beginning, what we tried to do with gamification. And in agile work environments, it's pretty common to use gamification to help in collaboration and communication, for example.

Or to learn about agile techniques, about testing, about refactoring and so on. And also what we did in our little game before, strengthen the self-organization of teams, for example.

So, then we saw that we are not the only ones doing gamification in our agile work. There are meet-up groups everywhere. That's just one example from Munich. We also have meet-up groups in Cologne. And there are over 800 people, for example, meeting regularly and just playing games after hours.

And then we thought, okay, we should do that too. And now once a month or every two months, we have that at Interactive. We meet with our team in the evening for one hour or for two hours and we just play little games that are fun.

That's one part of the thing. But then for the other hand, we really want to learn something in the same time. So, if you want to implement gamification in an organization, for example, in a software development company, there's a certain process you should follow

from our experience, from what we saw. And the first thing is you should define business goals so that your gamification program really has this deeper goal you follow and it's not just about having fun and about playing.

You should then define the desired outcome, the desired behavior. Normally you want to change people's behavior in a positive way, for example. And you should exactly define what you want to reach, what your goals are to be successful. Then it's very important to get approval.

Approval from your players, from your team so that they really want to play this game. As I said, you should never force somebody to play with you. And then also you should analyze the structure of your team, what player types they are. There's a so-called Bartle test and there's a certain classification of people.

It's mostly meant for online games, but it can be used pretty well for our gamification approach too so that you do a little online test with people and then you see

do they like to explore things or are they more the killer type so that they want to shoot things or whatever. And in the Bartle test they have different categories of players. They're called killer, explorer, socializer or achiever. And then you know better how your team is structured

and how you should design your gamification program so that the tasks or the quests you develop for the players are really aligned with their needs or what they want to do. Then you should design the game in detail.

The sign in the sense of really making up the rules and the story and everything. And then you need software, you need a platform. You need to do something to lock all the quests, all the tasks you want to do. You need to give the points and so on, so you need software.

And that's the main part for us what we had to decide how we want to do that. Everything else was pretty simple, but then we came to this question how could we manage our gamification model or our gamification program.

So then when you start the program it's very important that you have this feedback cycle. You cannot just let the program run, the gamification run and it will be good. You should always, like in Agile 2, like in Scrum 2, you should have the feedback process.

You want to know from your players how do they feel about the game. Is it okay? And you for sure have to adapt after a while. You have to get new quests. You have to change the topic of your game and so on to keep it always updated, to keep it fresh and to keep people really motivated to play on.

So we're in this process of deciding what software to use or what we could do, how to manage our gamification program and we looked around what's around. And one big chunk of software is commercial software,

mostly software as a service. You can rent the software you pay on a player basis mostly and then you get a fully functional ready-made software where you can just start. There are some examples there on the right side of the slide.

Software tools that you can use and start tomorrow with the gamification program. Then I found some add-ons and some open source tools which promise to do gamification in some sort, add-ons to clone even that you could use

but at the end we were not satisfied with the functions, those tools gave us. So finally we thought, why not use Plone or at least consider Plone and look at the options we have and yeah, we finally really decided to use Plone.

What do you need in such a gamification platform? Of course you need players. You need to be able to create and manage users, players in the system. You need an administration interface where you can add new quests where you can see what players did and so on. You need workflows

so that you create a quest but you don't want to publish it yet. Maybe later you want to publish it or whatever you want to want people to be able to send in a quest for review and after the review they get their points and then they get their reward

so that would be a typical workflow in a gamification platform and you of course need a nice user interface, user friendly application where people want to participate and where it's not a hassle to lock in and do something but it's just something you do

while you work anyway. So best thing would be to have some interaction with other tools or the software you use in your company for example if you use a ticket system and creating a ticket or working on a ticket would give you a reward

in the gamification platform then it would be nice if the ticket system tells the gamification platform that a user creates a ticket or updated a ticket so that points are rewarded automatically. Then apart from those technical things

you need a good story every online game you know everything you play is embedded in a good story and so we also thought what could we do and our first story we developed now for the gamification program that is running now

that is starting now at Interactive is based on Star Wars and we called it Plone Wars and so we started we started with a little intro at May the 4th Star Wars Day we created this

to introduce the program to our team I apologize it's all in German but the idea is just to give the story around our program and to make people feel that they are in something bigger than just this little small game

I guess we don't have to read all that because you won't understand it anyway so I will skip that then the game design when you really

focus on your game how it should look like it's all around the quests the quests are the center of any gamification program basically so you make people do something that's the quest, the task and when they do something they get rewarded for it

there's never a negative consequence if somebody doesn't do anything there's no subtraction of points or something it's always about rewarding good behavior or doing something good so since

we work with Scrum and we use the Fibonacci numbers to estimate our user stories for example we thought okay, our reward system could be based on that too so we gave the points for quests those points are 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 20, 40 and 100

as we do in our estimation games so that's the point part you get points for your quests then as a player you have a visible status that's also one important point of a game design so that you

like in an online game you have a badge for example telling you at what level in the game you are and how many points you have to reach maybe to get the next level and this telling you how many points you need would be the notifications, you get maybe email updates you get notifications on the platform

telling you where you are you get feedback if you did something good, if you finished a quest you are told what you did you are told what other people did so that you have a comparison to your teammates there's a review process for quests so if you finish something you have to give it to review not

to a manager but to mostly to a teammate so it's a peer review system it's pretty low level so that just somebody says I saw that he finished the task and I agree so you can get the points because we don't want to have a whole lot of administration

overhead so it's pretty low level then there's an activity stream kind of dashboard where you see what happened what you did in the last little while and what all the other players did and finally when you collected your points there's a reward system and you can exchange your points

for immaterial or material rewards the reward system is important for the motivational factor of course you should more build your gamification system on the intrinsic motivation that's the more powerful one

but apart from intrinsic motivation just have fun to play and be at the top of the leaderboard for example I think you also need some extrinsic motivation so you need some real rewards for your points so that you get whatever a cup of coffee if you did something

good then we designed our quests and we have a distinction between normal quests that one person can do we have missions that's a quest that one teammate can give to another teammate it's not made up by

the game administration but everybody can create missions and finally we have team quests team quests should be done by several people there are some examples of our real quest that we have in our system and the appropriate points for

that quest status of our gamification process we designed our game with the story with everything we wrote our user stories we did 11 development sprints

every sprint was one week and we developed our story around Star Wars as I said we celebrated Star Wars day on May the 4th we started the first episode the first part of the gamification program in October

and every episode is 30 days so we can reward people after one episode, after one month and then you go on, you collect your points for the next episode and at the end of the year for example we have an overall winner of the game

then after our first episode we had a feature sprint because we got the first feedback from the players they found bugs of course they had new ideas, what we could do and they found usability issues in the program so we addressed all that

so they saw, all the players saw ok, it's getting better and we want to do that further on too so that with every episode we enhance our gamification platform and finally when we think that

we can give this piece of software to somebody else we will do so we want to publish it as open source software so that if you're interested you could maybe try this for your organization too and enjoy your game

now some screenshots how are we with time? are we ok? so some screenshots from our system that would be the login screen again this is all in German so it's just the visual impression I can give you right now but the whole system is of course fully translatable

back and front and you could have in English, Spanish, French, whatever that would be no problem so that's the kind of dashboard where you have your activity stream you have your status you have your badge, you have your points, etc

then you have one part where you can choose your quests you want to do we have categories, all our quests are categorized so we want people to learn new methods for example we want to enhance their social competence and so on and the quests are categorized in those

topic areas then we have our Lido board so that's the manager view as a manager I see the whole status, I see all the players in the list and how many points they have the players themselves they only see the first three players

and their own position but they cannot see the whole ranking because it might be demotivating if you are the last in the list and you see that everybody is better than you that would be the store basically so the reward system

where people can see what they get for the points they collected so it would be for example you get 10 euros for Amazon or you get a soccer ball or you get one day home office or you get a cup of coffee or ice cream or whatever

and the higher the points that are attributed to the reward of course the more you have to do to get this reward and in the same sense the same thing happens with the quests of course I didn't say that when we saw the quests for example if you just bring out the trash

it's one point because it's nice that you do that but it's not a big thing but if you contribute to bring us a new customer for example there I would give 100 points for this quest that you did so there's of course a certain leveling and evaluation

how important the quest is you just did so that's also an administration interface where I can add the rewards and that's the manage view for episodes where I can create new episodes we gave them

names according to the Star Wars series in our case but of course you can think the whole gamification program with a lot of different topics it could be a soccer league or it could be a game of thrones or whatever you like and also the software we

created is completely flexible as an administrator you can change the color screen you can change the logo so you can do the re-branding of your gamification platform pretty fast pretty quickly that's the administration interface for quests where I as an administrator have an

overview can create and edit and delete quests and that would be a normal clone form to add a quest and the basic setting page for the gamification platform so that was just a quick visual overview and

then now we want to do we would like to do something you shouldn't do we want to do a live demonstration and I know that Murphy's law is against us and probably the internet will fail and the network will crash but we will try it anyway and try to lock in the system and Johan I will show a little bit

how it works this is the lock inside you can't see it, sorry

this is the lock inside and I will show you my, hopefully my dashboard

so, ok this is my dashboard as you can see as project manager and scrum master I don't get a lot of points so my position is 9 out of 12 that's not so good

here you can see the points I made I need to do to get to another level I made 28 points when you scroll down a bit you have the activity screen with the latest I guess 10 activities

of everyone I can switch to my activities so you can see last night I finished the quest of wearing some interactive clothes we have and sweaters and you can

get points for wearing them I got points for doing fitness three times a week and I actually got a message from another player but I don't know who it was yeah

what I want to do now is to get some points this is the dashboard for the quests we have here some common ones and the ones about learning new methods

and here we go to the engagement quests we created a quest for attending at a community event like Plone Conference so I'm gonna get 20 points for each day

that's good for me so I locked the quest and now I have to finish it I'm not sure if this quest doesn't need any reviews so I'm just typing in

attending attending Plone Conference 2018 day one

log this one and as you can see I have 48 points now I am position 8 and when I scroll down you can see in the activity screen that I locked it there

so when I go to the leaderboard as Jörg already told you I can only see the first three players and my position and the other ones are anonymous

and then we have a player list I don't know if we didn't do a screenshot of that one you can put in there a motto we have the birthdays over here you can also

change your profile picture over here and your motto and your email address you can see here your rewards I don't have any yet

and you have here the activity everything I did since we started ok now it's your turn again I guess ok, thanks a lot and that's about it

let's see thanks a lot for playing with us and for seeing our gamification platform if you have questions about

the gamification approach or about the software don't hesitate to contact us ask Johanna or ask me about it and we would be happy to talk about it thank you very much I guess we have time for some

questions over here do you have any integrations with Redmine Jenkins any tools not yet, but we use Redmine and that would be the next thing on our list that we have integration with Redmine

any other questions? come on, the question everyone wants to know what about the t-shirts? can we buy some? you don't have to buy it, I think we will just make a list or something

and everybody who is interested puts his name and his email address on it and we will send t-shirts ok?

so how much was there any custom work on Plone done for this or how much work was it to use out of the box Plone to create the gamification platform?

well we did 11 weeks of work but actually it was a project for our apprentices for people who start in our company and it was a great way for them to learn about programming and to learn about Plone and so for sure it took them longer than it

would have taken a programmer who is experienced with Plone but still it was ok like I found that time frame ok to develop it and Plone basically gave us everything we need like we have the workflows we have everything

we saw so it was more like creating some content types for quests and so on and then doing the styling and yeah not a big deal basically I am curious why you would

I mean if you had your apprentices do this that's great are you planning to try to get clients to use this because this looks really useful it wasn't the plan or isn't the plan for now

it was really something internal for us we wanted to use it for ourselves we will see how it works but the next step would be that we give it to everybody who wants to use it to get more feedback on it because for sure it's still a first version and it would be good to get more people playing with it and

we could enhance it I don't know maybe the future holds a business opportunity in it possibly but it's not the plan for now that's very kind of you because I really think it's good the way it is already any other questions?

great then I just created a mailing t-shirt list where you can write down your name, your email and your t-shirt size it's here in front I drew that very old school

with a piece of paper yesterday I had a talk about privacy so don't look at the other email addresses please just write your email address down but don't look at the others