A team had quite a long backlog of work sitting in their queue. I decided to throw a Team Service Request day, I would provide snacks and the team would put aside their current workload and would spend the day attacking that backlog of work together to try and get it down to a more manageable level.

I then got to thinking how could I make this more fun for the team and me, that’s when I came up with the idea of a Team SR Scrabble day. I had scrabble at home in my board game cupboard gathering dust. So I got it out, came up with a list of rules, split the team into two teams ensuring that there were a balance of skills in each of the teams.

I brought prizes for the team that won the scrabble game, the person who closed the oldest SR, and the person who closed the most SR’s. The prizes didn’t need to be expensive or fancy, they were a box of chocolates for the winning team and a movie ticket and bar of chocolate for the individual prizes.

Here are the rules to workplace scrabble:

SR Team Scrabble Rules

1) Every time a team closes 2 SR’s the team get to add a word to the scrabble board.
2) Team with the highest total at the end of the day being 5pm wins.
3) You are not allowed to or get customers to, create Incidents\SR’s just to close them off. These need to
be legit work.
4) You are allowed to work together to close a SR e.g. if you need help from someone else.
5) You are not allowed to use a device or PC to make your scrabble words.
6) The whole team can work on the scrabble word together.
7) Any type of VF call/request counts e.g. Incidents, SR’s etc.
8) The scrabble words need to be Official Scrabble words according to the scrabble rules.
http://scrabblewordfinder.org/dictionary-checker

In one day the team closed 42 SR’s and 2 Incidents, taking the queue down from 99 calls to 55 so nearly halved our queue.  A lot of food was consumed (I probably consumed at least a quarter of it), and the highlight of the day for me was seeing team members working together and training up other team members on new processes that they previously couldn’t pick up and complete. The amount of knowledge sharing, friendly competition and collaboration was awesome to see. We made this a tradition where as soon as our queue started to get unmanageable we would bring out the scrabble for a day.

Now I realise that this is a more reactive solution than a proactive permanent one, but a fun way to get a queue or backlog of monotonous work done.

This is just one simple example where you can turn the dull and boring into fun, come join my facebook page and let me know what other gamification ideas have you used in the past or plan to use in the future.

https://www.facebook.com/TheGeekyIntrovertedLeader/