Incentivize Us Properly Please – The Game

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You are leading an agile software development team, stories are being completed, business value is being delivered, and all is well. Out of the blue, you get an email from your manager asking for the 3 top performers on your team. You comply with management’s request only to find out that your top 3 performers end up receiving cash merit bonuses at the next all-company meeting in front of all their peers. Next thing you know, team motivation starts to decline, defects become more common, and the team just doesn’t seem as polished as it used to be. As the team lead, you find yourself having to answer management’s questions about what has gone wrong within a team that used to be a top performer. Does any of this sound familiar?

“Incentive Us Properly Please” is a highly interactive simulation that is intended to allow agile team leaders, management, and stakeholders to experience the challenge of creating a proper incentive system to sustain effective and high quality agile software development. During the simulation, participants work in small groups to decide how to allocate a limited number of incentive points between different intrinsic and extrinsic rewards, as the simulation progresses, participants will learn the impacts of their decisions, and gain insight into how to mix different types of incentives to foster enduring motivation. This fully experiential simulation will provide opportunities for participants to brainstorm, share and experiment with their own ideas for rewards and incentives suitable for teams completing knowledge work.

Participants will leave having gained an understanding of the types of incentives that are most beneficial to self-managing agile development teams and perhaps pick up a few innovative and new ideas for incentives that result from collaboration as the game is played.