=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-1360/paper5
|storemode=property
|title=The Business Process Game
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1360/paper5.pdf
|volume=Vol-1360
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/zeus/Herzberg015
}}
==The Business Process Game==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1360/paper5.pdf
The Business Process Game
Nico Herzberg1 and Matthias Kunze2
1
SAP Germany,
nico.herzberg@sap.com
2
Hasso Plattner Institute (University of Potsdam),
matthias.kunze@hpi.de
Abstract Recently, gamification – the augmentation of work with game
elements – attracted tremendous interest and has become one of the most
important trends in digital business strategy1 .
In this paper, the authors elaborate on the opportunities to gamify
operative business process management, in particular process enactment,
and show various ways to engage process participants in their daily work,
support them achieving their goals, and develop their skills. A concrete
implementation of gamification in business process management is shown
on a use case and a detailed discussion of future research is given.
1 Gamification in Business Process Management
Gamification is the discipline utilizing game elements, such as points, badges,
and leaderboards, and experience design, e.g., game play, play space, and story
line, to engage and motivate people to achieve their goals [1,2]. It targets at
customers, communities of interest, and employees – in particular knowledge
workers – as players and focuses their goals through player centered design [5].
To create value with a gamified solution the sponsoring organization needs to
align supported player’s goals with their own goals.
In this paper, we concentrate on the fact that gamification strives to engage
knowledge workers to reach their goals by incorporating game elements into the
context of their tasks and responsibilities within an organization’s business pro-
cesses. Motivation is seen as a means to support the worker in changing behaviors,
in acquiring new skills, and building on existing expertise and performance.
With regards to business process management (BPM), we focus on the process
participant, who carries out parts of business processes. Besides the execution of
tasks in the context of the process, this includes to understand the underlying
process model, its technical and organizational environment, i.e., resources and
interaction partners, as well as documenting the results of the operations carried
out. In contrast, other research approaches, for example, described by Santorum
et al. [6,7] resort to social aspects, motivation, and gamification of process
formalization and analysis, process modeling, and simulation.
Hence, by introducing game elements to operational aspects of BPM – becom-
ing skilled in new processes, enacting them, and their improvement – we aim at
1
http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2702117
T. S. Heinze, T. M. Prinz (Eds.): Services and their Composition, 7th Central European Workshop,
ZEUS 2015, Jena, Germany, 19-20 February 2015, Proceedings – published at http://ceur-ws.org
The Business Process Game 27
the process participant as our main game character or player. For this purpose,
we introduce the following game elements.
Process scores Participants can receive scores for each business process they
are involved in. The sum of scores for one process represents the participant’s
progress in mastering the process.
Badges, leaderboards Upon exceeding a score thresholds, participants are
awarded with badges to publicly show their progress. Often, new features
and responsibilities are associated with earned badges.
Points For each earned process score, the participant receives a point in their
personal account. In contrast to process scores, these points can be traded
for certain features or benefits.
Challenges Challenges are particular efforts that need to be carried out to gain
additional scores.
Challenges, in particular, offer an opportunity to foster the collaboration
between different process participants. In general, collaboration requires to hand-
over work to other participants, which often results in delays in a business process
as the receiving person needs to familiarize themselves with the incoming work.
Hence, by challenging collaboration, we envision participants to work together
more closely, e.g., in concise personal meetings.
2 Stages and Badges in Mastering a Business Process
As mentioned above, we aim at supporting process participants in mastering
business processes. Therefore, we have identified three principal stages that
describe, how familiar a participant is with a business process. Badges are
associated with each stage, as stated in Figure 1. Here, we provide only the main
badges that need to be earned to enter the next stage. To implement the approach,
more badges should be awarded while traversing each stage, respectively.
Apprentice Master Champion Guru
IMPROVEMENT &
ONBOARDING ENACTMENT
MENTORING
Figure 1. Stages and badges of mastering a business process
Onboarding. At the beginning of the onboarding phase, the participant has no
experience at all in carrying out the business process. This can be the case if the
participant has been assigned new responsibilities or the process has been newly
introduced or recently re-engineered. This phase is closely related with the first
achievement, the apprentice badge, which is earned by familiarizing oneself with
the business process. Process scores are earned by collecting information, and
thus acquiring knowledge, about the process.
28 Nico Herzberg and Matthias Kunze
On the one hand, passing this stage can be achieved by setting up artificial
cases in the fashion of a role-playing game: Apprentices are faced with a simulation
of historic cases of the business process and need to carry them out. They need
to take the right choices, access the right information, interact with adequate
resources, and meet predetermined deadlines. On the other hand or subsequent
to the role-play, the apprentice tackles real cases under the supervision of more
experienced participants who mastered the same process such that they earned
the champion badge.
Enactment. Once apprentices have gathered sufficient experience in the process,
i.e., their process score surmounts a certain threshold, they are awarded with the
process master badge and are ready to perform the business process without the
supervision of a mentor. Nevertheless, mentors remain available for assistance,
thus fostering collaboration between colleagues.
The enactment stage is the main stage and will be discussed further in
Section 3. Process scores are earned by individual or collaborative performance and
improvement. That is, getting better at carrying out operations, e.g., increasing
the quality of results and the timeliness of documentation, and getting faster, e.g.,
reduce waiting and execution times or executing more cases. Key performance
indicators can be used to align operational goals of business processes with
the performance of process participants. However, such measurements must be
designed carefully and transparently as not to counter collaboration or other
quality or performance goals.
Improvement and Mentoring. Burke [1] states that gamification works best
with intrinsic motivation, i.e., the emotional urge to personal development. One of
these intrinsic factors is personal assistance, i.e., if persons are able to help, they
receive implicit and explicit praise. Another intrinsic driver is the establishment
of a positive impact on one’s environment, e.g., a business process. Both require a
high skill in process mastery, and therefore such process participants are awarded
with the champion badge.
So far, we envision two ways to leverage intrinsic motivation. First, a very
experienced process participant can become a mentor, who advices apprentices
in the onboarding stage. Second, process participants can contribute to the
improvement of business processes, both actively and passively. Actively, they can
propose changes to the business process to improve its outcome or performance.
Passive contribution can be carried out by “betting” points on a proposed change.
If the change is applied successfully, passive contributors earn the amount of their
stake and the proposer earns an amount that relates to the sum of stakes put
into the proposal. If a business process is re-engineered, existing champions may
be downgraded as they need to first familiarize themselves with the new process.
However, the proposer and supporters of a change, who certainly understood it
well, remain in the position of a process champion.
When applying gamification to BPM, one needs to bear in mind that the execution
of a business process is, in general, a collaborative effort. That means that different
people with different roles are involved as well as interaction partners, e.g., from
The Business Process Game 29
other departments or organizations. However, as gamification aims at motivating
individuals, any means to employ it in business processes requires well defined
and transparent measures for the individual performance of process participants.
We elaborate on this in the next section.
Department
Quality Assurance
3 Gamified BPM in Action
Organization Development
denial
request
received
In the following, we present a gamified BPM requestsolution with the example updateof a process
evaluation
for specifying
prepare job a job that
requestwe
job designed with a German
/
health insurance
update
/
request provider,
description description documents approval
see Figure 2. The process is mainly driven
request by the organization development
salary
(expanded pool) but needs input fromproposal
incomplete other departments of the company with
which it interacts. The principles of gamification can be applied to onboard new
process participants, to execute the process efficiently, and to set a scene for
process improvement, as elaborated Human on inResources
Section 2. In this section, we focus on
Committee
the efficient execution of the process.
Department
Quality Assurance
Organization Development
denial
request received
request update
evaluation
prepare job request job update request
/ /
description description documents approval
request
salary
incomplete proposal
Human Resources Committee
Figure 2. Business process model for specifying job descriptions at a German health
insurance provider, including individual and collaborative tasks to earn process scores.
Once a new job specification is required, the job description is prepared for
further interaction with the other departments. This is an individual task by an
employee of the organization development department and thus, gamification
targets on that individual (shown as a dashed line area with one individual)
for these steps. In contrast, the following steps involve collaboration between
the organization development employee and the department for which the job
description is created (shown as a dashed line area with a group). In an iterative
fashion between the two participants, the job description is to be completed
successfully. Motivation of only one individual would lead to a decrease in
quality, e.g., the organization development employee could quickly accept the job
description without proper proofing for a quick completion and claim the lack of
quality is due to the interaction partner. Therefore, and to sport the successful
30 Nico Herzberg and Matthias Kunze
collaboration in the context of the business process, a gamification solution for
several parties is required.
The completed job description must be evaluated by the quality assurance.
Again, this is a collaborative effort as the employees of the quality assurance
department and of the organization department should be stimulated to produce a
joint result quickly. In parallel, the salary proposal from the human resources office
is incorporated (collaborative). After these two steps, the documents are updated
(individual) before approval is requested from the committee (collaborative). If the
job description is approved, it can be sent to the department to be implemented
(individual), otherwise it needs to be updated again (collaborative).
The activities preparing the job description, updating the document, and
sending out the approved job description are an individual process participant’s
responsibility for earning process scores for the particular process to reach the
next badge. In contrast, working on the other activities in the process depends on
the work of other departments’ employees as well. Thus, process scoring involves
the performance of other people.
The concrete playground for the shown process is designed with the following
levels that are rewarded with a badge when successfully completed, cf. Figure 2.
Introduction Learning about the process theoretically by studying all process
documentation and understanding the process model. To become an appren-
tice, this level is completed by successfully passing a challenge, i.e., a test
that asks questions about the process.
Advised process execution The process apprentice is responsible for execut-
ing the particular process, but is supported by a champion in the role of a
mentor. Both of them can score by efficient process execution. The apprentice
needs 100 process scores to become a master.
Personally improve execution performance The process master is respon-
sible for executing the particular process and can score with an efficient
process execution including individual and collaborative efforts. The master
needs 1000 process scores to become a champion.
Process execution, improvement, and mentoring The process champion
is responsible for efficient process execution, process improvement based on
process model level, and mentoring process apprentices. Champions score
in all three areas and get additional points when improving the process. To
become a guru, champions need to score 1000 points year by year.
Process Development Being a guru enables an employee to access a pool of
specific tasks of the business process management office, e.g., the design of
completely new business processes or the consolidation of business process
duplicates and variants that are the result of merged departments or com-
panies. These specific tasks allow employees to reach the next level of their
personal promotion.
The Business Process Game 31
Scoring while executing the business process is possible by performing the single
activities efficiently and meeting KPIs, which are set as follows:
– Preparing the job description once it is requested within two days will result
in 2 scores, within three days in 1 score, and in more than three days in
0 scores.
– Complete the job description with the department within three days will
result in 2 scores, within five days in 1, and above in 0 scores.
– Get the evaluation done within one week will be rewarded with 1 score.
– Receiving the salary proposal within one week will be rewarded with 1 score.
– Updating the job description document with the salary information and with
the changes proposed by the quality assurance within two days will result in
1 additional score.
– Receiving an approval/denial by the committee within two weeks (they are
meeting only twice a month) will result in 1 score.
– Getting an approval by the committee in the first attempt is a challenge for
all process participants contributing so far. Hence, 5 extra scores are given
to each participant involved in this case prior to approval.
– Working on a requested update after a job description denial within two
weeks will result in 1 score.
– Sending out the approved job description within 2 days will result in 1 score.
Meeting KPIs within a business process execution environment could be measured
by applying approaches such as proposed by Herzberg et al. [3,4].
Rewarding collaborative tasks fosters the interaction between participants and
encourages them to team up, e.g., in phone calls or personal meetings, instead
of just handing over work items. Furthermore, the interaction partners of the
business process can earn points with their immediate contribution.
Points earned in either of the above ways, or by means of successful pro-
cess improvement, if the participant is a champion, can – in turn – be spent
on supporting particular process model improvement proposals, which other
champions propose. Thereby, process model improvements are evaluated by all
process champions. Promising process model improvements will be promoted
by the support of many process champions, non-promising improvements will
be downgraded. Successful process model improvements that result in value for
the company will be rewarded by points, whereas improvements that are not
implemented or not successful will result in the loss of the spent points. This,
however, requires that process management respects the impact of improvement
promotions by champions.
4 Game Credits
In this paper, we outlined how the principles of gamification can be applied in
business process management to support onboarding new process participants,
engaging participants in efficient process execution, and improving the process.
Completing process activities and accomplishment of challenges is rewarded with
32 Nico Herzberg and Matthias Kunze
process scores and the development of individuals is awarded with badges. These
unlock new levels of responsibility, e.g., to mentor new process participants or
vote for process improvement proposals. A case study has been presented using
the example of a job description process designed for a German health insurance
provider.
We already envision various directions for future research. First and foremost,
a study needs to be conducted to evaluate how and to what extend knowledge
workers get influenced by a gamified business process execution environment. We
have discovered arguments that support a positive effect on process performance,
but also ones that suggest the opposite, i.e., overall performance decrease.
One potential reason for a negative impact is the risk of tricking the system.
If, for instance, only the execution of few pilot business processes is gamified,
employees may concentrate their effort on these processes, while non-gamified
work falls short. Also, scoring measures may be cheated, if they are not carefully
designed.
Additionally, rewarding of efforts shall be investigated in more detail. This
includes aspects such as rewarding collaborative efforts in more detail, e.g., by
distributing scores received as a team to the individual team members according
to their respective contribution to the joint achievement. Also, negative rewards
in case of insufficient performance need to be explored.
Finally, we argue that, for gamification to become successful, it should be
incorporated into the lifecycle of operative business process management, and
not only in its execution phase. We envision modeling aspects that allow the
specification of gamification mechanisms and measures directly in the business
process models, such that they are also implemented when the model is put into
operation.
References
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