As we all experience somewhere in our lives, it can be very boring and stifling to just assign a task and wait for that job to be completed. For this reason it is necessary to make this a little more fun. This is where a very deep art, called “gamification” comes into play. You can find many online courses, books, articles etc. on the subject. Today, I will talk about how you can use this technique in your team or project work, how we transfer it to our daily work as Yesil Science and how we took the Sprint Plan table we shared with you before, not just a step forward, but two steps forward.
Since the first time we made the Sprint Plan chart, we’ve added a lot of gamification into it over time. One of them is the “Corrected Hour” section, which shows the total working hours of the people. Why “Corrected Hour”? Because we write in our sprint plan not only our work but also the courses we take to improve ourselves. Since these courses are individual, we made the scoring differently and added it as “Corrected Hour”. Here, we assign a color and emoji to people through 4 parameters. In this way, we can see the people who have taken a lot of workload or those who have a low workload compared to others, who barely have any tasks, that is, the “Ghosts” when they are invisible.
Emojis (workload) : 🥵→ Extra, 🤓→ Optimum, 🥶→ Few, 👻→ Ghost
Another gamification is the “Completion Score” section, which shows how many percent of individuals complete their personal tasks at the end of the week. This place only uses business-related hours. Thanks to the formula we use here, this score is only visible on Monday (the day we completed the tasks of the previous week). Here, we made emoji assignments according to completion score over 4 parameters and color assignment over 3 parameters.
Emojis (% complete): 💪 → Great, 👍 → Good, 🥶 → Okay, 👻 → Bad
Finally, by processing all the parameters you see below with different coefficients (the importance of these coefficients was scored and averaged by the whole team), we get the total score (SCORE) of each person and create a leaderboard based on this score. The parameters we use in the calculation are:
So far, I have told you one step forward. Now it’s time to take this one step further 🙂 How?
All this data, colorful tables are nice, but it is tiring for people to enter and fill in excel constantly. We thought how we could do this data more neatly, without going through excel sheets. And we found the answer: A mobile app! But we have to do this quickly and we need to do it so that we can use the excel spreadsheets that we have already used, so how will this happen? GlideApps is helping us at this point. This site provides you the opportunity to set up a web application either by receiving data from google sheets (ie excel) or through the templates it hosts. It has a very easy interface but of course it doesn’t take all that short to set up everything without problems. At first, it will take a considerable time (of course not enough to launch a mobile application, it will not even pass by), but afterwards you will have great comfort. Let’s get to know Yesil Science Scrum App together.
SIGN-IN
First of all, we encounter a login page like every application. You can log in here either via your gmail, another email address, or just with a password that you set. You can choose one of these options when developing the application.
LEADERBOARD
The first screen after logging in is the “Leaderboard” screen. With the filtering in the upper right, you can sort the people as SCORE or the parameters used for the SCORE calculation, in an increasing or decreasing way. Clicking on a name opens a screen where you can see all the parameters of that person. You can also see that person’s photo, email address and phone number. At the end of the page comes the section we call “Daily Scrum”. This is the part where we add the work we do on days we don’t have meeting (Tuesday, Thursday and Friday for us).
ATTENDANCE
Next to the leaderboard section is the Attendance section. People use this place to indicate whether they attended the meeting, attended late, left early, or was on leave.
DAILY SCRUM
The Daily Scrum section right next to Attendance is used to see the Daily Scrums that I have mentioned, day by day.
TASK
In this section, you can see the tasks given in the projects. You can see the tasks of the desired person only or more than one people by filtering from the top right. The sections on the page that opens when a task is clicked are;
NEW TASK
Here, we can add new tasks to the related project. We use the parts with 📚 emoji beside them to add ideas that are not urgent at the moment, which we call STORAGE. When you click one of them, you can fill the PBI, Task, Assign, initial effort and status sections from the page that opens.
CHARTS
Finally, there is the “Charts” section. Here you can see graphically:
When you press the 3 lines on the top left, you will see a menu. The “Reports” section here is the section where the reports in the tasks are seen collectively. From the “Team Attendance” section, you can see who is attending to which meeting day by day. Finally, you can see the individual working hours and the corresponding emojis from the “Hours” section.
Here’s how our adventure, which started with a simple (!) Excel file, led us to make a great web-application (but maybe with some bias). Who knows how beautiful and compelling but satisfying places we will go from here.
I wish you to be the people who research, adapt and develop the technology you have discovered in this technology age; Stay with the technology, see you in my next post.
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
1 Comment