Monthly Archives: September 2019

Gameful Project Management: Qualifications

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Reading time: 5 minutes

When we teach something, we often contemplate and report about our experience with the subject at hand.

I might be the first person to use and define the terms “Gameful Project Management,” “Self-Gamification,” and “Self-Motivational Games.” But this is not the sole reason why I think I am qualified to talk about turning project management (or anything else) into fun games.
Let’s consider my experience with game-related topics and project management, one after another.

Why am I qualified to teach turning anything into games?

My “serious” interest to games, game design, and gamification started only a couple of years ago.

The first time I turned anything consciously into a game was only five years ago. It was before I heard the word gamification, and before I started reading books on game design and game thinking.

I am a non-gamer without any qualifications in software, game, or gamification design, nor in psychology. I may well be the first person of this kind to explore gamification and apply it to herself. And to teach it.
My lack of a game-design background is, in fact, an advantage. Because if I can turn my life into fun games without having studied gamification or psychology in detail, then so can you.

I believe my primary qualification for explaining and teaching Gameful Project Management and Self-Gamification is the enormous fun I have had turning my life into games; experiencing happiness multiple times every day while doing so; and never wishing to stop designing and playing my self-motivational and uplifting games.

My experience with project and team management

My first experience with project and team management goes much further back to my school years in the former Moldovan Soviet Socialistic Republic. It started with managing sewing projects for girls younger than me and help them sew various things for their dolls. I organized our meetings, made sure I had some extra material and tools with me. And I taught them how to do it. My skills were quite elementary, so I often needed a “consultant.” And my mom took this role happily on.

I was also the head of Oktiabrionok, Young Pioneer, and Komsomol* groups first in my class, and later in the whole school, I was attending.
I don’t remember leading any teams during my university years, but there were many projects to take care of both at home (helping my mom and my sister, after my father’s death) and for my studies.
After several years of work as a researcher at the Institute of High-Frequency Electronics of the Technical University Darmstadt, I was appointed as the coordinator of our laboratory and its clean-room. Since then I lead small and large teams, both within a single organization and a global working group of an international community (the latter for almost twelve years).

The projects I managed or helped managing varied from small, through medium, to large, both for the private sector, but also for such organizations as ESA, NATO, and German and other Defence organizations.

Today I manage various projects at home and for my business. The teams for these projects involve my family and entrepreneurs who help me with my book and online course projects and also help me with navigating marketing and publicity world.

Even if I had such a colorful and long-range of experience with project and team management, I am still an unofficial project manager**, meaning that I never had formal training in project management.
The closest (but still quite remote) that came to such a formal training was summer came with training courses for schoolchildren who volunteered as heads of their Komsomol* school committees in Moldova during Soviet times. It was fun to recall those times. I must say that among others, I learned many soft-skills there that still make sense and are also taught today all over the world.

Apart from that, I participated in training courses on disciplines and tools that had to do with the project and organizational management. Examples are SAP*** and S1000D****.

I also taught numerous S1000D training courses, including the topic of Business Rules, which are the knowledge base of all decisions (many hundreds of them) on how to implement this international specification for technical publications.

I also lead various teams as well as the Business Rules Working Group (BRWG) of the S1000D community (the latter, as mentioned for almost twelve years). I am still a member of this group. BRWG is responsible for developing concepts for S1000D implementation and S1000D project management.

Required by the art of my work, I also studied various technical standards, such as ISO***** necessary for establishing quality assurance processes in a semiconductor device production environment, as well as the development of software documentation.
Now, as I write a book that deals with project management, I reach out to my currently favorite teachers — books (and sometimes articles) — to learn more about this multi-dimensional discipline.

I did read books on project and time management in the past. But now, after having been turning my life into fun games for several years, I have become aware of something in the most of the resources on project management, of which I haven’t been aware before.

I will share with you what that is in the following blog post (“Gameful Project Management and Its Focus on Success instead of Failures”).

References:

*

** “If most of your work time is spent on projects and you’ve never been exposed to formal project management training, you are an unofficial project manager.” — Kory Kogon, Suzette Blakemore, James Wood, Project Management for the Unofficial Project Manager

*** SAP: www.sap.com

**** S1000D: www.s1000d.org

***** ISO: www.iso.org

If you want to learn more:

Sign up to Optimist Writer’s Blog to follow the Gameful Project Management series.

Check out my coaching and consulting services to work directly with me.

Take a look into my book Self-Gamification Happiness Formula.

Go to this link for the list of all resources I offer on Self-Gamification.

GPM: Achieving Improvement Without Forcing It

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Reading time: 4 minutes
Abbreviation: GPM = Gameful Project Management

Recently when I shared my project on Gameful Project Management and its non-judgmental core, the person I told about it asked me what I thought about change management. After a few minutes more into the conversation, I understood that with “change,” she meant improvement. So what she asked about was how to adjust project management to achieve improvement.

Why is the word “improvement” tricky?

I hear the question about improving what we do or even ourselves a lot recently. Even kaizen, which is one of the techniques I practice every day, and which is part of the Self-Gamification approach, translates as “continuous improvement.”

However, this expression can be understood as if improvement was a goal of kaizen. But I experienced that it should not be a goal. If it is a goal, then I label the way I am now — or the status of my projects — as not good enough. However, labeling something as bad or not good enough is not only stressful and confusing, but it is also counter-productive and not meaningful.

What is the best way to improve something?

As it turns out, the best way we can improve anything, including ourselves, is to stop trying to improve it.

That is what Gameful Project Management can do for you. It enables you to achieve improvement without forcing it.

When you approach each of your projects, as well as the project management project itself, as if they were fun games — of which you are both the designer and the player — then each moment of your work (and your life) will feel like the best you had so far. And then, the next will be even better. Improvement will become an effortlessly reachable by-product; not a forced and hardly reachable goal.

The anthropological foundation of the Gameful Project Management

As we discussed in the previous blog post, Gameful Project Management is based on Self-Gamification approach, which relies on the synergy of anthropology (= awareness and non-judgmental seeing), kaizen (= breaking everything into small, digestible, and doable bits), and gamification (= bringing fun game elements into what we do).
And the foundation of it all is anthropological, that is non-judgmental seeing of any of your projects and the status in them.

Today, anthropologists apply an approach they call “cultural relativism, an approach that rejects making moral judgments about different kinds of humanity and simply examines each relative to its own unique origins and history.”*

This approach is one of the foundations of anthropology, and it “is the comparative approach, in which cultures aren’t compared to one another in terms of which is better than the other but rather in an attempt to understand how and why they differ as well as share commonalities.”*

What to look at while applying anthropology

So, next time you think of improving something, or even improving yourself, stop, and look at everything in front of you non-judgmentally. Look at and become aware of:

  • Where you are in the project and in general.
  • What your circumstances and those in the project(s) are.
  • What you have at your disposal right now at this moment.
  • Where you want to go with your project(s) — that is what are your goals in the project.
  • Where the customers of your project want you to head with it.
  • Where the step you just took directs you — it might be away from the set goals, but don’t judge what you see.
  • What the various ways are, with which your brain judges the situation you and your projects are in, and also how you judge judgment and complaint, both yours and that from others.
  • What is the best next step to take toward your goal — criteria for such a step are: it should be small and effortless to take, and it should be fun.
  • How you can appreciate each small step you take. Remember, it is not about keeping a strict account (Note: a topic for another post). It is about appreciation, awareness, and having fun.
  • Other that might have come to your mind as you read this list.

Do all that non-judgmentally, in other words, without labeling something as good or bad and without dramatizing it, but simply iterating from one step to another, discovering the fun in every step of the way, as you usually do in games.

Yes, this is also possible in project management.

References:

* Cameron M. Smith, Anthropology For Dummies

If you want to learn more:

Sign up to Optimist Writer’s Blog to follow the Gameful Project Management series.

Check out my coaching and consulting services to work directly with me.

Take a look into my book Self-Gamification Happiness Formula.

Go to this link for the list of all resources I offer on Self-Gamification.

GPM and the Synergy of Three

Gameful Project Management
Reading time: 3 minutes

Often, the name of a concept does not give away everything it is about. The same applies to Gameful Project Management (GPM). As gamification itself, it is much more than just adding “points, badges, and leaderboards”* to your operational processes and reporting systems.

Self-gamification as a source

While developing this content for project managers, I will lean on the approach I call Self-Gamification, which is an art of turning any- and everything in our lives into games.

The Self-Gamification approach embraces three well-established and known techniques and methods, which can also be described as philosophies.

These are:

  • anthropology,
  • kaizen, and
  • gamification.

Gameful Project Management also takes roots in these three approaches.

Three approaches embraced by self-gamification and gameful project management

Anthropology, as it stands today, is about the non-judgmental study of cultures. And the same can be done on a personal level. You can study yourself as a culture of one person; you.**

Kaizen embraces breaking anything into small, effortlessly manageable bits. That can be a challenge, the path to reach our goals, or even rewards we give ourselves or others for making those small steps.***

Gamification is about bringing the best of what games give us into real-life situations. It is about bringing the fun factor in what we do besides games. It is also about willing to see what we do in our “regular” lives as games, any project, and any activity.****

Tapping into the synergy of three

Later in this blog series, I will share more on each of these approaches plus refer to the work by those from whom I learned about them.

I will also address the reasons, why I think these three approaches work so well together.

But here is a little summary. Together, all three approaches, methods, and philosophies create a fantastic synergy. It has its foundation in awareness, progresses one brick at a time, to finally built a beautiful and fun house that we would enjoy to be in. It is about being both the designers and the players of what we do, regardless whether we think we want, need or have to do that.

References:

* Yu-kai Chou, Actionable Gamification: Beyond Points, Badges, and Leaderboards

** “Practice your anthropological approach. Pretend you’re a scientist observing a culture of one — yourself. The trick is not to judge what you see, but to neutrally observe how you function, including your thought processes. Awareness and kindness are key.” — Ariel and Shya Kane, How to Have A Match Made in Heaven: A Transformational Approach to Dating, Relating, and Marriage

*** Robert Maurer, One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way, and The Spirit of Kaizen: Creating Lasting Excellence One Small Step at a Time

**** A great example of resources on how to facilitate and achieve gameful thinking is Game Thinking: Innovate Smarter & Drive Deep Engagement with Design Techniques from Hit Games, by Amy Jo Kim

If you want to learn more

If you would like to learn more about Gameful Project Management, then I invite you to follow the articles in this series and for that to subscribe to the Optimist Writer’s Blog. You can sign up here.

If you would like to work closely with me, and optimize your project management practices gamefully (= in a light, creative, and inexpensive way), then check out my coaching and consulting services on Gameful Project Management as well as Gameful Writing here.

If you want to learn more about the approach that lies at the base of the gameful project management — self-gamification — then check out my book Self-Gamification Happiness Formula.

For the list of all resources, I offer on self-gamification go to this link.

Get your free Self-Gamification e-book copy today

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Hi,

I hope you enjoy turning your projects and activities, and your life, into fun games.

I have some news that I would like to share with you here.

From today and until coming Sunday, I am running a free e-book promotion on Amazon for my book Self-Gamification Happiness Formula: How to Turn Your Life into Fun Games.

You can get the e-book for free starting with today (immediately, Sep. 6, 2019) and until including coming Sunday (Sep. 8, 2019).

Here is the link to the Kindle page of this book on Amazon.com:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07SV46VPP

If you are purchasing on another Amazon site, then search for “Self-Gamification,” and you should find it easily.

Please remember that this free e-book promotion finishes in only two days. Thus, I invite you to get your free e-book copy now.

By the way, if you don’t have the free Kindle app yet, here is the link to it for your convenience: https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=free+kindle+app

I wish you a beautiful and gameful day and weekend,

Victoria

P.S. Those who purchase one of my products on Self-Gamification can join the Self-Gamification Club (a secret group on Facebook). If you get the e-book through this free promotion, then you are not eligible to join the group. If you want to join the Sel-Gamification Club, then you can buy one of the other products I offer on Self-Gamification. You will find more information on that both in Self-Gamification Happiness Formula and on the page introducing Self-Gamification Community here.

An Invitation to an Online Cafe

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A timer and a cup of espresso. You will these two often find on my desk ( the first often set to 5 minutes, and the second – sometimes empty).

I recently learned of a page ko-fi.com where the creators and their supporters could meet, and it had a flair of a cafe. I like it because it feels for me like a mixture of Instagram, Twitter, Blog, and a Crowdfunding space, all in one. Plus you support not just in money, but with a cup of coffee. 🙂

So, I started the page also to share, apart from my writing, some fun pictures from my daily life (I don’t use Instagram anymore). Especially the images of coffee and games. 😀 The ko-fi.com/optimistwriter will be about turning our lives into fun games.

In my first post there, “Join me for a cup of coffee (or tea),” you can read what it will be about and what I will be posting there.

To check out what I offer on ko-fi.com, press one of the links above, the image below, or the button on the widget on the right of each page of this site.

If you want to learn more

If you would like to learn more about Gameful Project Management, then I invite you to follow the articles in this series and for that to subscribe to the Optimist Writer’s Blog. You can sign up here.

If you would like to work closely with me and discover how you can optimize your project management practices gamefully (= in a light, creative, and inexpensive way) the check out my coaching and consulting services on Gameful Project Management here.

If you want to learn more about the approach that lies at the base of the gameful project management — self-gamification — then check out my book Self-Gamification Happiness Formula.

For the list of all resources, I offer on self-gamification go to this link.