Mentor Program's Best Quarter Ever At 120 Hours!

This last quarter (March, April, May 2014), about 120 hours of awesome knowledge was shared through the Mentor Program. To be exact, it earned 4790 points which is a new high score. In order to make it more fun for all, the program is gamified where 10 points equals 15 minutes.

Looking at the activity in the program, I see many more presentations were given. Many of these presentations are the same presentations that will be given later at conferences all over. This includes presentations about Gamification, Data Science / Big Data, and possibly even Rails.

I appreciate all of those who took the time to share and/or receive knowledge essential to the company. We’re all stronger and happier as a result. So, good job and thanks!

update: For those of you who were curious, check out the blog post about the program that I wrote last year.

The Mentor Program Viewed Through Octalysis

As it exists today, I am the founder and Product Owner of our company's Mentor Program. The mission of the Mentor Program is to empower people to share knowledge essential to the company such as technology knowledge.

The program has an internal web app which displays the names of people who have participated by either sharing or receiving knowledge. Without getting into the details about how to earn levels, those who have participated heavily receive a digital and an in-real-life badge reflecting how they participated and when.

A Sample of the Dashboard Screen

A player can see the web app either through a browser or in the software developer lab on a large monitor screen in the corner.

Meaning, Accomplishment and Loss

On the monitor, we showed the same thing that the browser version showed for about two weeks. It couldn't show everything which was a problem. So, we had two key changes made to the monitor version of the web app:

1. Sort names by most recent activity 
2. Show only those who have contributed to the current quarter, our Current Mentor Heroes

Sorting the names by the most recent activity, is a newsfeed inspired approach. It helps deal with the issue of having too many names to show on the monitor. It also highlights the accomplishment and meaningful contribution just made by the players for their recent participation.

Showing only active participants as Current Mentor Heroes got interesting results. Doing this introduces into the program a feeling of loss. Can you imagine what happened when the new fiscal quarter came in March and everyone saw a blank page that said nothing more than "Current Mentor Heroes"?

One of the key developers in the program asked me if I wanted to revert it back to showing the normal dashboard. I responded with a "nope" and a smile. Sure, it bothered me to see nothing up there. It bothered everyone and that's the point! We were all used to seeing those colorful accomplishments and names. We were now feeling loss which was instilling a sense of urgency to get something up there.

In less than a week, I had a helpful person email me saying they wanted to help us out. They let me know about some recordable participation. That person understood the program vision and wanted to contribute to our cause in a meaningful way. Other people followed up in that same week and we had over 13 hours worth of knowledge sharing!

Similar to Octalysis Core Drives

The decisions recently made are similar to pieces of the Octalysis Gamification framework. The framework is centered on Human-Focused Design and created by Yu-kai Chou. Having watched all the Octalysis videos available, I see Octalysis Core Drive #8, Loss & Avoidance which instills some urgency. Urgency does overcome a problem we've had in the past. These changes also highlight what could be called Core Drive #2, Development & Accomplishment. FYI, the Octalysis community discusses these drives at https://www.facebook.com/groups/octalysis If you like, you may join our friendly Facebook group.

What's Next?

Although I have ideas, what is next will come out of a discussion with my Mentor Program team. They are wonderfully insightful people with a variety of skills. Undoubtedly, one of two things will be worked on. We may focus on a progress bar approach or reduce the friction of getting knowledge seekers hooked up with knowledge givers. These ideas came from members of the team who are passionate about empowering others with sharing and receiving knowledge. If you're not surrounded by awesome people and ideas such as I am then I highly recommend you seek some now!

Last Quarter Beat Previous Year And It Was Only Two Months Long!

The Mentor Program is going strong! Essential technological knowledge and more is getting shared much more than before I applied Gamification to the program. To dive deeper into the Mentor Program, check out Gamification Meets Technology Mentor Program.

I am the Product Owner / Manager of the program. Due to our company getting bought, our calendar changed. Last quarter consisted of only two months, October and November. Yet, those two months yielded a score of 1010 points which is over twice what it was the year before at 440 in the year of 2012. The year before that it was 600 in that same quarter, October, November and December of 2011.

So, a two month quarter beat previous 3 month quarters!

515% Lift? Gamification and Mentor Program

I am the Product Manager aka Chairperson of an internal company effort known as the Mentor Program. It's our mission to empower people to share technological and other essential knowledge with each other. To dive deeper into the Mentor Program, check out Gamification Meets Technology Mentor Program.

We had a fantastic last quarter (July, August, September):

• Our program goal was 1600. We did twice that at 3200!
• Compared to FY13Q2 of 520 points, 3200 is a 515% increase year over year (YOY)!  

I believe increased productivity, morale, self-esteem, and a sense of empowerment has also resulted. 

Some of the new elements added / changed in this last quarter are:

• Badges have a new easy to understand theme with a level of progression on them via stars
• We added leaderboards that shows how the different departments are doing as instructors and students
• Although not new, I have an awesome team of people dedicated to this effort!

Most of all, it's fun! 

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me, Mike Finney. My favorites are LinkedIn and twitter.

Huge Lift This Quarter - Gamification and Mentor Program

Today, I did the numbers and wow! There was a huge lift this last Q1 quarter compared to last year's Q1. The score for the Mentor Program FY14Q1 is 3590 compared to 1080.

Since 10 points equals 15 minutes, 3590 points equates to almost 90 hours of knowledge sharing! All of it is comprised of CARFAX employees sharing knowledge with CARFAX employees! 

Granted, the number of potential players expanded from our group / department to the whole company. If I focus on just the people in my group, the score is 2930 which is still a huge lift!

The benefits of knowledge sharing are increased productivity, morale, self-esteem, sense of empowerment and more! Doing it with Gamification made it fun and more engaging for the players. 

So, what are you doing to make your world more engaging either at work or in your life?

Gamification Meets Technology Mentor Program

It all began with watching Jane McGonigal's TED talk, The game that can give you 10 extra years of life. I realized that Psychology, technology, and Game Design have come together at last; it's called Gamification. To our delight, it's fun and successful!

Let's take a step back...

Besides being an iPhone/iPad software developer, I'm the chairperson of our department's technology Mentor Program. It's our mission to empower people to share technological knowledge with each other.

Up to now, we did two things. 1) We published a list of people who want to share knowledge. 2) We roughly tracked how much time people spent instructing others. It was OK yet boring.

We set goals. The last quarterly goal was something like: We want 10ish hours (10 to 15 hours) spent sharing knowledge. Weekly, I would report how things are going with: "OK everyone. Our goal is 10. Everyone excited?" (..ZZzzzzz...)

In January of 2013, things were real slow and knowledge sharing was minimal. Something had to be done! After consulting with a friend of mine Julie Price, we Gamified our program.

Now we do three things. 1) List of people and how they want to share knowledge. 2) We track every 15 minutes spent. 3) We share our accomplishments as scores, a departmental score and each instructor's individual score.

Following the Extreme Programming idea of Big Visible Charts, Shane Davenport came up with the idea of a fundraiser chart like approach which I playfully name funraiser. Our goal was 700 points which is 17.5 hours of knowledge sharing.

We blew the top off our goal! Here's the chart:

At the time of this writing, we are at over 1000 2310 points which is translating to about 58 hours! We even have 3 weeks left!

Update: We ended the quarter with 2310 points which translated to 57.75 hours. The year over year growth aka YOY in the program was 45% and the gamification was only introduced in this last fiscal quarter!

For the curious, the photo contains 3 sections with names that are blotted out white in this photo.  Sections contain a list of instructors who got us to our quarterly goal with their names in a star image and another list of instructors who have gone above and beyond our quarterly goal.

So, there it is! Some tuning should be done, sure. There are even many fun directions this can go! 

Like Gabe Zichermann points out, Gamification is an ongoing process as opposed to just slapping something on top. Discussing how game thinking can become a part of what you are achieving is for another time.

Until then, may we all have a life filled with Epic Wins! 

( Pssst! If you have questions, contact me, Mike Finney or post them here! :) )