I just read this article from wired  about using games to engage people to work. The basic premise is that if you make something fun, as in a game, then people will be more likely to participate. Even better is that the time and effort from these "gamers" is actually usefull. It got me thinking about RM and project teams. We were talking today at Jama about teams feeling like they are part of something and that a key ingredient to the success of the project is the excitement of the team. An inspired team is, in my opinion, much more likely to succeed than a stressed, bored, or disgruntled team.

So what could our tool do to provide some fun while helping with the success of the project? I'll hope for some additional feedback but for now will supply one idea I came up with:

Daily task review (not to catchy)

On a previous project we had daily standup's to discuss what we were planning on doing that day. It was hard to get people engaged because there was a fine line between gabbing on and on giving too much detail or worse just saying "same as yesterday" or "bugs". One thing we tried, and it seemed to work...for a while...was to say in a couple of sentance's what we planned to do that day. The key is "That day". We would then write it on a card, put today's date and stick it on the wall. Then the next day we would look at the card and indicate whether or not it was finished, if not we'd evaluate what's left, rephrase and put today's date.

Wouldn't it be cool if each day a developer/analyst/QA/PM logs in to Contour to play "Daily Task Review". The trick is that rather than the developer having to pull information the system would push. From there it would show yesterdays task and ask "did this get done?". You'd answer "yes" or "no", if "no" then you'd be asked to amend the task, recalculate and move to the next. A "yes" scores you 10 points. A "no" scores you one less for each day the task is extended (9,8,7...). The data from this would be usefull for helping PM's estimate future projects but the scores would be used in comparison to other members on the team, like a competition. You could even add some handicaps for things like "new to the technology" or "new to the company" to allow for ramp up.   This isn't about who's better at completing tasks but rather who's better at estimating. In addition, you'd get better and that could also be tracked using nice fancy graphs. Teams could, and should, still do daily standup's but having reviewed

tasks team members would be more succinct and informative.