January 2013

We’re in the midst of creating some new training material and have been exploring innovative ways to engage our trainees. Through our research, we’ve discovered gamification, which means using game thinking and game mechanics in non-game situations.  We’re really excited about it!

To see this concept in application, check out codeacademy.com. The site is an interactive, free, learning program designed to teach common programming languages. Information is presented in short segments that allow the learner to practice as they go, solving problems to advance to the next module. Each time a milestone is reached, the user is rewarded with a badge and an encouraging message, providing instant gratification and an immediate sense of accomplishment. The reward system makes learning and completing each module addictive, as the user works toward collecting more badges and completing more content. 

We’re all looking for new ways to engage our work force and make training stick. In a world where so much of our work is disconnected from the final product, gamification provides a sense of accomplishment that isn’t always easy to mete out in the harried day-to-day of the office. This idea has real merit – and makes work fun.

I read the new PMBOK 5^th edition last week and noted there were two significant changes:

• More emphasis on understanding the project in context of the overall business value, objectives, organizational strategy, programs and portfolios.
• Creation of a 10^th Project Management Knowledge Area called Stakeholder Management.

I was very happy to see the emphasis on business value. In the Infogrinder process, the first questions we ask ourselves and clients before starting any project are:

• What is the desired outcome? (What is the objective?)
• What is the value that this project provides?  (Why are we doing this in the first place, and is it worth spending time and money on?)
• Is this project part of a bigger project? (How does this project fit into the bigger picture?)

We consider these questions so critically fundamental that they are the core to our approach. We ask them continuously throughout the project, and this is key to staying focused on what matters most. For example, if circumstances change and a project is no longer delivering value, why continue to spend time and money on it?

As for Stakeholder Management, you know from my previous blogs that I feel strongly about the importance of managing stakeholders effectively in order to keep good projects from going bad. Managing stakeholders is all about identifying who they are, what potential impact they may have on the project, understanding and managing expectations, and establishing a two-way flow of communication to ensure the right information gets to the right people at the right time.

PMI considers stakeholder management important enough to warrant a separate knowledge area in PMBOK.  Research continues to reveal high project failure rates, often due to the make-or-break nature of managing and engaging stakeholders.

We’ve seen the pitfalls and the paths to prevention, and agree with PMI’s assessment. Today’s portfolio, program and project management practitioners must improve stakeholder management skills in order to succeed.

The 4 Disciplines of Execution by Chris McChesney, Sean Covey, and Jim Huling.

The 4 Disciplines of Execution are rules for translating strategy into action at any level of the organization.  What I liked about the book is that it incorporates principles of focusing on what’s most important, using leverage, 80-20, commitment and follow-up.  The authors promote narrowing a company’s focus to a few Wildly Important Goals at a time, and then applying a disciplined process of execution.   

One really interesting concept is that of setting leading measures to reach the goal.  We tend to measure what has happened in the past, instead of what we need to do in order to make something happen.  Leading measures define small outcomes and behaviours that you want to team to perform. These are measurable, within the team’s control, and predictive of success in reaching the goal. 

As the name suggests, these results can be measured objectively and posted so that the members of the team can see how well they are doing in moving toward the results. 

Take a look for yourself.  I found this book an interesting read.