Gambling way to improve team performance - Tree Poker

In a branch of a large company in Russia, it was necessary to send three representatives to a gay parade in Europe. As expected, no one was found. It was decided to send the heads of departments where labor productivity is lowest. In the last weeks before sending, the performance of the entire enterprise has increased significantly ...

True Story, British American Tobacco
Traditionally, GTD refers more to personal time management and the achievement of personal goals. Although much more interesting and difficult to achieve good performance in a team of several people. How to make sure that everyone works to the fullest, but in moderation, everyone does the right thing, and in such a way that it corresponds to the skills and abilities, and even everyone is interested and motivated, and the whole team achieved its goals? .. About this hundreds of books are written which are of course useful, but we would like to share a rather interesting, simple, gambling and effective way to increase productivity in the team, which we have been using for several months. Who cares - we continue ...

Prologue

As you may have guessed, our method is based on poker. We call it "Tree Poker" (after the name of our project ). If you are already familiar with poker, then everything will look easy, although I tried to describe the method in simpler terms, without resorting to the specifics of poker or other similar games.

Cooking

The project manager (or the entire team) selects a number of performance parameters. This number must be equal to the number of participants in the team. For example, you can choose the number of found bugs in a project, or the number of new clients, acceleration in performance, code coverage with tests, number of tests, and the like. It is highly desirable to choose quantitative parameters, since It is obvious that it is difficult to objectively assess what is more important (whose rate is higher) - feature A or feature B (for example).
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Process

Once a week (day / month), the whole team is going to a collective "poker". For each parameter, the starting rate is set - usually the figures for the last week (day / month). In turn, each participant selects the indicator he likes and makes his own bet - i.e. says, for example, "I think we can get 100 new customers." The next participant can either increase this rate or select another indicator. This goes on in a circle, each “player” can either raise the stakes or agree (answer - “call”) to any current bet. The game ends when no one wants to raise the stakes higher. The winner is the one who has the highest bid on any parameter. This person will be responsible for achieving the stated (at his rate) indicator for this parameter. If by the end of the week (day / month) he succeeds - he gets a bonus, in our case two days of rest. If not, it does not receive anything or receives a fine, for example two days of work.

Let's look at an example:

Parameter	Starting value	Vasya's bet	Kolya's bet	Petit's bet	Who won and why
New customers	ten	15	25	20	Kohl - he put above all
Test coverage	65%	75%	70%	75%	Vasya - he was the first to say 75%, Petya agreed.
Found bugs	15	Not	Not	25	Petr, only he made a bet

Details

Based on the example, we can conclude that Kohl is most likely better able to cope with attracting new clients, Vasya with writing tests, and Petya with direct testing. This is exactly what happens in practice - people confident in their skills tend to put higher in pursuit of the bonus, and if there are outsiders in the team, they get less desirable (non-core for the team) tasks. Thus, resources are naturally distributed by the most appropriate tasks. The key point is to choose suitable indicators. A good leader will do it right away (or maybe he has already), a less experienced manager will be forced to experiment.

The game is designed so that the team is constantly trying to improve their performance. Obviously, the losses are inevitable, and then the team in a natural way adjusts their opportunities (rates) for the next game.

Depending on the business objectives, such a game is not always suitable (for example, qualitative, rather than quantitative improvements are needed), but ultimately, the task of any business, as they say, is faster, higher, stronger. So the approach can be combined with other known methods, or change indicators (say, the number of happy users).

Epilogue

When we started to use the described method - it turned out incredibly funny and fascinating. Perhaps we are just all reckless, but there is nothing more fun than trying colleagues on the subject “is it weak for you?”. Sometimes you lose, but you still want to continue.

At Habré, we have already become famous as "positive sexual alcoholics", now it seems we deserve the title of "gambling gamers". But I bet that no one will be offended. I hope I will not stay without a bonus.

Yours sincerely,

A.B.