Often I’ll share my list of common Teams “user scripts” with customers during their pilot phase of Teams adoption. To me, it’s a way of giving them “homework”, or a list of tasks to complete that, if done, help them understand common scenarios when using Teams:
But, what if, instead of a simple spreadsheet, I could turn these tasks into a game, complete with a leader board, that an organization could use to help their users get excited about Teams? Here’s my idea of how that could be done with Teams, Flow, PowerBI and Forms.
Our implementation will include:
- A Teams channel where Game Challenges are posted
- A Teams channel where user activity and LeaderBoards are posted
- Teams Tabs for each Challenge (using a SharePoint page to display the challenge details, and a Form to collect responses)
- A Flow that stores Form submissions into an Excel spreadsheet, as well as posts messages to Teams of user activity
- A PowerBI report that creates a visual of the LeaderBoard
In my Challenges Channel, I’ll have several Tabs (with their respective channel msg posts) representing each challenge in a SharePoint page. Using either the channel posts or the tabs themselves, users can get details for any challenge they’re interested in:
Once they’ve completed the challenge, they can return to the Tab or SharePoint page to fill out the Form which will give them credit for completing the task.
The Forms could simply ask “Did you Complete Challenge #2?”, or perhaps each one could ask the user whether they think the Teams method is more productive than the old-school method. Hopefully, Teams wins each time, but even if it doesn’t, that’s valuable info to collect for the “R” portion of your ADKAR change management model. (Hint: Reinforcement – Making sure people continue to use the new methods)
Make sure you set the Form to only allow a single response. This way if a user somehow returns to a challenge they’ve already completed, they’ll be greeted with the appropriate message:
As the Forms responses come in, we’ll store them in an Excel spreadsheet, similar to what we did in our previous "Tracking End User Video Training" post. At a minimum, all we need to collect are names, so we can add up the total amount of submissions. But of course, we could store more information in the spreadsheet for more metrics, perhaps related to which challenges are being completed:
I chose to create a separate Flow for each Form, with each Form submitting the name to a central spreadsheet (I put mine in the Files area of the LeaderBoard channel).
We’ll then also use that spreadsheet as a dataset for a PowerBI report that will visualize our leaderboard data:
(Note –our chart here will refresh based on a schedule – not real-time, but good enough for this example)
Lastly, we’ll use Flow to report the results back to the Leaderboard Channel (along with a reminder to check the Leaderboard Tab) so people can see the progress of their peers in real-time. (They may or may-not want to Follow this channel – depends on how engaged everyone is with the game):
With these features implemented, as well as a commitment by the local Game Master to share some social praise when someone finishes all the challenges, we’ve now got a working Teams Adoption Gamification system!
:trophy:Bonus Points for Teams Adoption! :trophy:: what if you create a challenge with a bit of complexity to it? A real head-scratcher that might require your users to… collaborate with each other to figure it out? Hopefully, they’ll realize they can start a Tab Conversation about that particular Challenge Tab and share ideas. It’s the gift that keeps on giving!
In closing, let’s discuss the obvious: this particular implementation is based on the Honor System. 😊 It’s pretty easy for someone to cheat and give the impression they’ve completed all the challenges. With a little thought, though, there are certainly ways to tweak this to minimize or eliminate bad behavior.
Other than that, let’s get ready to gamify our way towards full Teams adoption – game on!
For more articles in this series, follow #TeamsFlowInGCC in Linked or Twitter, or view this series in the Public Sector TechCommunity Blog.
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