If you are so sick and tired of people accusing you, maybe you should stop laying bullshit. Link to real information instead of spewing crap. Let me show you how.
One more time, so you get the gist. In the same INDEC table linked above you can see that unemployment is around 8%. The fact that you would spit out a number like 25% shows you have no clue what you are talking about.
So stop acting like 10 year old and provide some real information. You just have to come up with a source on the single item I did not figure out for you. Try it.
Or at the very least give the insults a rest. They make you look even more stupid.
I live in Argentina too, but I dont have to live here to tell your numbers are bullshit.
- The 25% figure the GP quoted is "people below the poverty line", not unemployment. Unemployment is around 8% nowadays, so youre hugely off base. - There are more like 3M people employed in public jobs. The total working force is around 17M, so its hardly half the working population. More like 18%. - Finally, public spending is around 500M pesos with a GDP north of $2200M, so again around half of what you quoted.
All in all, there is 0 real information in your post. All the numbers you quote are off by 100%. Just the fact that 54% voted to reelect the president should tell you that the situation is not as clear cut horrible as you appear to think. So much for living here.
The point is gamification is not a metric system, it's a framework. It allows for non-excessively-technical managers to tune metrics (or scrap them) and incentives while keeping them transparent and understandable.
I'm sorry to hear you don't get anything but money from your job. If you work in a massive call center then it's very likely you are subject to a number of hard metrics that you must keep in mind, making the job very unsatisfying and stressful. Your place of work might not be a good place for implementing this sort of thing.
The fact that it's not a silver bullet for every situation doesn't negate the value of the tool either. In my other comments I have suggested scenarios where it works well.
Comment was meant as a joke. I'm hardly interested in selling anything here, I can get a better SNR pretty much anywhere else for commercial purposes.
If you have used Stack Overflow (or, you know, Slashdot, who's been using Karma since forever) it's possible you may not have felt the whole thing was a "game". Same thing at work, an off site day is not "pretend you are nice so you get a pay raise" day. It's honestly meant to be fun. In the same way Gamification can be used for good purposes.
It can definitely be abused, just like any other tool. But if used in a smart manner it can reap great benefits.
I guess there is nothing that works in every situation. The most fun metric to measure IMHO is the one you change them from time to time. Keeping the same one for too long is either boring or encourage cheaters.
That's exactly the point. Our product allows managers to change point assignments to tune their gamification system, and define quests that they think are important for their business. In the end, it's about giving help desk managers the ability to create a metering/incentive system that maps well to their needs.
Subjectivity is no problem. A gamification-based metric is only good as a relative metric. If you have a tech in the same position you have dealing with the same types of requests, neither of you should get an unfair score because of this type of issue. You can't expect to have an "anyone below 200 points/day gets fired" scheme, you have to understand metrics for what they are.
The interesting thing is you can then look at requests that cause trouble and see statistical information about them. If hundreds of people are complaining about this, you can actually do something about it.
Our gamification system's implementation doesn't pretend it can replace a manager. It is precisely about giving managers the tools to measure things they way they want or feel is good and place incentives where they should be.
I only disagree with your last statement. Good managers don't replace performance metrics. Good managers know how to create them, measure them, and then understand them for what they are (not less, not more). I regularly have people telling me they want to be able to "pause" an SLA because an issue will take longer than expected, for example.
This is a real problem, which is why there is great emphasis on being able to change point schemes and quest definitions to keep it current and as moving a target as feasible.
Games pull it off all the time though, and helpdesk managers typically have an extra ace up their sleeve in that they are the supporter's bosses. So many of the problems that exist for MMO don't exist when you lose the 1st "M" (the one that stands for Massive). Typically a help desk staff is not as big, and therefore much more manageable in a face-to-face way to correct issues.
This is a good point. We have ideas in the pipeline for this issue as well. They either involve some sort of bounty-based scheme (where managers can set up bounties for specific tasks - usually the hard ones) or reasessing the point value of actions based on the "tough nut to crack" factor (time since inception of the issue times priority, or something along those lines).
All in all, the important part is that gamification is a quantum leap in the tools you have available for metering and tracking work (compared to, say, hours spent on X). There is still lots to be discovered and built in this direction, and we are trying to figure it out.
Not really. Management needs measuring and gamification is a great form of it, with other good side-effects. It can be done poorly, like any incentive system, but I think there is real value in the toolset.
Unlike an Internet forum, you can easily fix some issues with real life discipline. If a tech is unethically gambling the system you can address him directly. It's real life fraud, not comment spam.
My people are in a hurry? How would you possibly know that?
Gamification is a tool, like salary, bonuses, good chairs, free meals, hammers and screwdrivers. You can use them for whatever they want. I know the "combo" quests are amusing and give out nice bragging rights with the other guys in our company. Customers are liking it as well. If you come from a "fail the quest and be fired" attitude then obviously it turns into a mindless drone thing, but that is not gamification's fault, it's the managers'.
From this point of view, the gamification functionalities are a form of measurement that is good in the ways I described above (easy to understand and tune, transparent, easy to audit). You can then use it to support any type of money compensation scheme you like. In the end it comes down to a management decision, we just build a software product.
Or you can actually have fun using it. I know we have extra fun with our own support tracker in the office since this was implemented. Continuous integration systems (Hudson/Jenkins) have had this for a while and developers love it. And I don't think anyone ever got a pay discount for breaking a build. Monetary incentives are not the final answer to everything. Alfie Kohn's "Punished by Rewards" has some interesting points on the subject.
We don't sell support services, we build a helpdesk product that companies buy and use to provide support services. We also use our own support tool to support our customers, obviously.
I don't mind a plug if it's pertinent and relevant. The fact is I probably have spent more time thinking about gamification than 99% of the people reading this thread, and therefore have some insight to share. I provided a link in case someone needs more information or wants to see the actual implementation:)
Customer satisfaction is *the* metric for a customer support service. Even for "internal customers" (people inside your company) it's a big deal. You won't get fired for a bad rating, and if the customer is an asshole this can be traced back and reviewed by a coordinator/supervisor by tracking where your points came from (there is a history log of everything).
It sounds like you are coming from a "tech vs. the rest" type of experience. In most non technology companies, tech is service for the rest, so a change of mindset is in order.
In the end, it's about people. Tools are just supposed to get all non-people problems out of your way (such as communication, tracking, measurement, etc).
The trick is in closing the feedback loop. Not all projects are software projects, where quality is highly subjective and unmeasurable. At InvGate we introduced earlier this year a set of tools to bring gamification to the helpdesk.
If your system can measure the actual quality of the work (which is possible in IT/customer support environments by gathering feedback from requesters) then you can actually have an incentive system that works.
Bad system: * 10 points for solving a ticket * 1 point por replying to a ticket * 4 points for chipping into another tech's tickets (allegedly to help out) * -20 points for reopened ticket * -100 points for SLA missed
If you ever worked in this type of environment, you can already see the incentives pushing for quick, bad replies to customers in your tickets and everyone else's, and new requests filed instead of reopening old ones.
But what about this?
* 1 point for solving a ticket * 15, 10, 0, -10, -20 points for 5, 4, 3, 2 and 1-star customer ratings on those tickets * -100 points for SLA missed * 200 points bonus for doing 10 5-star tickets in a row * 1000 points bonus for doing those 10 5-star tickets in a row in less than one hour
It even starts to become fun! And if you plug gamification throughout the whole system, even this (taken from a "Knowledge Week" quest that lasted through a specific week in an InvGate Service Desk instance): * 10 points for creating a Knowledge Base article * 15, 10, 0, -10, -20 points for 5, 4, 3, 2 and 1-star customer ratings on those articles * 20 points for having the article you created used by other techs to solve a ticket * 50 points for having the article you created used by customers to figure out the ticket themselves
There other significant side effects to a gamification setup in this situation:
* You get a performance metric in the amount of points an agent gathered during a period of X * Non-geek helpdesk or customer support admins can tune incentives themselves (an earlier approach with a "black box" combined metric resulted in questions about how it's calculated, and why it's doing things that you don't expect) * Unlike the case mentioned above, gamification-based metrics are transparent. Everyone can understand what's going on with a score counter that pops up when you perform actions. * It even has a "ka-ching" sound effect when you get points!
Chrome for mostly everything, and Firefox to access intranet sites with self-signed SSL certificates because to this day and age I can't tell Chromium on Linux to accept a friggin' self-signed certificate and stop prompting me every single time I access the site. No, adding the certificate to my trusted list at the OS level doesn't work.
Slashdot Mirror
So you think people that get an unemployment pension are counted among the "employed"? Wow.
Like I said, [citation needed]. You don't know squat.
Good riddance.
If you are so sick and tired of people accusing you, maybe you should stop laying bullshit. Link to real information instead of spewing crap. Let me show you how.
For example, here's a real newspaper saying there are around 3M people in public jobs, and here's the INDEC data saying that 46% of the population is in the active workforce. Hence you are 100% off on public jobs (hopefully you can figure out that the total population is around 40M without my assistance).
One more time, so you get the gist. In the same INDEC table linked above you can see that unemployment is around 8%. The fact that you would spit out a number like 25% shows you have no clue what you are talking about.
So stop acting like 10 year old and provide some real information. You just have to come up with a source on the single item I did not figure out for you. Try it.
Or at the very least give the insults a rest. They make you look even more stupid.
I live in Argentina too, but I dont have to live here to tell your numbers are bullshit.
- The 25% figure the GP quoted is "people below the poverty line", not unemployment. Unemployment is around 8% nowadays, so youre hugely off base.
- There are more like 3M people employed in public jobs. The total working force is around 17M, so its hardly half the working population. More like 18%.
- Finally, public spending is around 500M pesos with a GDP north of $2200M, so again around half of what you quoted.
All in all, there is 0 real information in your post. All the numbers you quote are off by 100%. Just the fact that 54% voted to reelect the president should tell you that the situation is not as clear cut horrible as you appear to think. So much for living here.
How is this possible? Isn't IQ normalized? The average is always 100.
The point is gamification is not a metric system, it's a framework. It allows for non-excessively-technical managers to tune metrics (or scrap them) and incentives while keeping them transparent and understandable.
I'm sorry to hear you don't get anything but money from your job. If you work in a massive call center then it's very likely you are subject to a number of hard metrics that you must keep in mind, making the job very unsatisfying and stressful. Your place of work might not be a good place for implementing this sort of thing.
The fact that it's not a silver bullet for every situation doesn't negate the value of the tool either. In my other comments I have suggested scenarios where it works well.
What do you think he meant? It's just not possible to extort customers into giving you a positive review if the system is designed well.
Comment was meant as a joke. I'm hardly interested in selling anything here, I can get a better SNR pretty much anywhere else for commercial purposes.
If you have used Stack Overflow (or, you know, Slashdot, who's been using Karma since forever) it's possible you may not have felt the whole thing was a "game". Same thing at work, an off site day is not "pretend you are nice so you get a pay raise" day. It's honestly meant to be fun. In the same way Gamification can be used for good purposes.
It can definitely be abused, just like any other tool. But if used in a smart manner it can reap great benefits.
In this situation, gamification as a measuring concept helps you find out which ones are good and which ones aren't. Works for everyone doesn't it? :)
Sorry to hear you had such a lousy manager :(
I guess there is nothing that works in every situation. The most fun metric to measure IMHO is the one you change them from time to time. Keeping the same one for too long is either boring or encourage cheaters.
That's exactly the point. Our product allows managers to change point assignments to tune their gamification system, and define quests that they think are important for their business. In the end, it's about giving help desk managers the ability to create a metering/incentive system that maps well to their needs.
Subjectivity is no problem. A gamification-based metric is only good as a relative metric. If you have a tech in the same position you have dealing with the same types of requests, neither of you should get an unfair score because of this type of issue. You can't expect to have an "anyone below 200 points/day gets fired" scheme, you have to understand metrics for what they are.
The interesting thing is you can then look at requests that cause trouble and see statistical information about them. If hundreds of people are complaining about this, you can actually do something about it.
I agree with pretty much everything.
Our gamification system's implementation doesn't pretend it can replace a manager. It is precisely about giving managers the tools to measure things they way they want or feel is good and place incentives where they should be.
I only disagree with your last statement. Good managers don't replace performance metrics. Good managers know how to create them, measure them, and then understand them for what they are (not less, not more). I regularly have people telling me they want to be able to "pause" an SLA because an issue will take longer than expected, for example.
This is a real problem, which is why there is great emphasis on being able to change point schemes and quest definitions to keep it current and as moving a target as feasible.
Games pull it off all the time though, and helpdesk managers typically have an extra ace up their sleeve in that they are the supporter's bosses. So many of the problems that exist for MMO don't exist when you lose the 1st "M" (the one that stands for Massive). Typically a help desk staff is not as big, and therefore much more manageable in a face-to-face way to correct issues.
I should get myself a badge for that :)
If you call do ask for Gonzalo so I can give you a slashdotter-friendly demo myself.
This is a good point. We have ideas in the pipeline for this issue as well. They either involve some sort of bounty-based scheme (where managers can set up bounties for specific tasks - usually the hard ones) or reasessing the point value of actions based on the "tough nut to crack" factor (time since inception of the issue times priority, or something along those lines).
All in all, the important part is that gamification is a quantum leap in the tools you have available for metering and tracking work (compared to, say, hours spent on X). There is still lots to be discovered and built in this direction, and we are trying to figure it out.
Not really. Management needs measuring and gamification is a great form of it, with other good side-effects. It can be done poorly, like any incentive system, but I think there is real value in the toolset.
Unlike an Internet forum, you can easily fix some issues with real life discipline. If a tech is unethically gambling the system you can address him directly. It's real life fraud, not comment spam.
My people are in a hurry? How would you possibly know that?
Gamification is a tool, like salary, bonuses, good chairs, free meals, hammers and screwdrivers. You can use them for whatever they want. I know the "combo" quests are amusing and give out nice bragging rights with the other guys in our company. Customers are liking it as well. If you come from a "fail the quest and be fired" attitude then obviously it turns into a mindless drone thing, but that is not gamification's fault, it's the managers'.
From this point of view, the gamification functionalities are a form of measurement that is good in the ways I described above (easy to understand and tune, transparent, easy to audit). You can then use it to support any type of money compensation scheme you like. In the end it comes down to a management decision, we just build a software product.
Or you can actually have fun using it. I know we have extra fun with our own support tracker in the office since this was implemented. Continuous integration systems (Hudson/Jenkins) have had this for a while and developers love it. And I don't think anyone ever got a pay discount for breaking a build. Monetary incentives are not the final answer to everything. Alfie Kohn's "Punished by Rewards" has some interesting points on the subject.
We don't sell support services, we build a helpdesk product that companies buy and use to provide support services. We also use our own support tool to support our customers, obviously.
I don't mind a plug if it's pertinent and relevant. The fact is I probably have spent more time thinking about gamification than 99% of the people reading this thread, and therefore have some insight to share. I provided a link in case someone needs more information or wants to see the actual implementation :)
Customer satisfaction is *the* metric for a customer support service. Even for "internal customers" (people inside your company) it's a big deal. You won't get fired for a bad rating, and if the customer is an asshole this can be traced back and reviewed by a coordinator/supervisor by tracking where your points came from (there is a history log of everything).
It sounds like you are coming from a "tech vs. the rest" type of experience. In most non technology companies, tech is service for the rest, so a change of mindset is in order.
In the end, it's about people. Tools are just supposed to get all non-people problems out of your way (such as communication, tracking, measurement, etc).
I get you mean it as a joke, but this is not possible, any decent system only allows feedback after the issue is closed.
The trick is in closing the feedback loop. Not all projects are software projects, where quality is highly subjective and unmeasurable. At InvGate we introduced earlier this year a set of tools to bring gamification to the helpdesk.
If your system can measure the actual quality of the work (which is possible in IT/customer support environments by gathering feedback from requesters) then you can actually have an incentive system that works.
Bad system:
* 10 points for solving a ticket
* 1 point por replying to a ticket
* 4 points for chipping into another tech's tickets (allegedly to help out)
* -20 points for reopened ticket
* -100 points for SLA missed
If you ever worked in this type of environment, you can already see the incentives pushing for quick, bad replies to customers in your tickets and everyone else's, and new requests filed instead of reopening old ones.
But what about this?
* 1 point for solving a ticket
* 15, 10, 0, -10, -20 points for 5, 4, 3, 2 and 1-star customer ratings on those tickets
* -100 points for SLA missed
* 200 points bonus for doing 10 5-star tickets in a row
* 1000 points bonus for doing those 10 5-star tickets in a row in less than one hour
It even starts to become fun! And if you plug gamification throughout the whole system, even this (taken from a "Knowledge Week" quest that lasted through a specific week in an InvGate Service Desk instance):
* 10 points for creating a Knowledge Base article
* 15, 10, 0, -10, -20 points for 5, 4, 3, 2 and 1-star customer ratings on those articles
* 20 points for having the article you created used by other techs to solve a ticket
* 50 points for having the article you created used by customers to figure out the ticket themselves
There other significant side effects to a gamification setup in this situation:
* You get a performance metric in the amount of points an agent gathered during a period of X
* Non-geek helpdesk or customer support admins can tune incentives themselves (an earlier approach with a "black box" combined metric resulted in questions about how it's calculated, and why it's doing things that you don't expect)
* Unlike the case mentioned above, gamification-based metrics are transparent. Everyone can understand what's going on with a score counter that pops up when you perform actions.
* It even has a "ka-ching" sound effect when you get points!
Chrome for mostly everything, and Firefox to access intranet sites with self-signed SSL certificates because to this day and age I can't tell Chromium on Linux to accept a friggin' self-signed certificate and stop prompting me every single time I access the site. No, adding the certificate to my trusted list at the OS level doesn't work.
The problem therefore becomes finding beautiful women willing to volunteer for a one way mission to Mars with a slashdotter.