How Gamification Helps Improve the Project Management Life Cycle

Project management success relies on leaders being able to engage, satisfy and rely on their teams to offer the best performances possible. There are a number of factors that can get in the way of realizing that goal, one of the most important of which has to do with the individuals involved themselves. When people aren’t happy or interested in the jobs they have to do anymore, it’s likely that quality and performance will begin to slip in ways that stakeholders will notice.
The best solution for solving these concerns is to come up with a way for firms to encourage their workforce to enjoy their jobs. There’s no way businesses can force their workforce to enjoy what they do, but there are methods of improving motivation and engagement. Gamification is among the top methods of achieving this outcome.
In the project management life cycle, there are ways of encouraging people to be excited about their jobs, and gamification is the best way of inducing these outcomes. The best in enterprise interaction ensures that personnel are willing to give their all in terms of output and performance because they’re really engaged in what they need to accomplish. Achieving this kind of outcome is much easier with an option that encourages people to strive for better rewards based on personal performance.
Create more opportunities
One of the best elements of gamification in the project management life cycle is the ability for businesses to really get the most out of their personnel. Instead of coercing or demanding better performances out of key personnel, these resources allow companies to offer workforce something they want in return for delivering better performances.
“The use of gaming techniques to reward enterprise mobile users in a non-game setting has big benefit potential, namely to drive improved efficiencies in the field and deliver superior customer service,” Gil Bouhnick of ClickSoftware told The Wall Street Journal. “Specifically for service organizations, gamification has [the] power to engage and excite a workforce, increase productivity and improve service delivery with game tactics.”
Enhance flexibility
The best strategy for enterprise project management life cycle maintenance is to ensure that operations are able to meet with different employee needs, expanding the potential of any group environment. As CIO Online’s Sharon Florentine reported, this quality makes it possible to spread out the stress and reduce the total impact of business messages by ensuring that personnel have tools that are in-step with how these operations generate better opportunities for corporate communication and success.
What’s more, project management can see better turnout from its team members when people feel motivated to do their jobs. The tasks associated in completing specific challenges may be new, strange and difficult for many personnel, but gamification can help personnel understand why it benefits them personally and not just the team or the organization to meet these high demands.
Make it fun
Gamification has the unique capability to make work fun, as Florentine wrote in CIO. Apart from the basic principles of gamification, which include benchmarking, incentivization and public recognition of success on the behalf of every employee who meets certain requirements, this process makes people enjoy their work more just by getting engaged with these kinds of programs.
When people love their work, it’s easy to see more positive engagement and interest in providing superior performances. Overcoming traditional project management obstacles like collaboration, communication and schedule management is much easier when gaming principles are added to the project management life cycle.
Achieve new ideas
On top of just being able to get more engagement and productivity out of team members, gamification has the unique ability to produce more ideas and generate more cross-talk in the project management environment. That’s because this method of thinking and working is more in tune with promoting healthy challenges that encourage people to think outside the box, as Forbes contributor Knowledge Wharton commented.
The source pointed to a University of Washington trial called Foldit that helped researchers come up with new and dynamic ways of creating protein models and understanding biochemistry innovations. In exchange for their work, participants were given global rankings and points. This shows how basic incentives can encourage genuine thinking and unique innovation in diverse project management settings.