Gamifying Project Procurement to Incorporate Better Goals of Organizations in the Public Sector : A participatory simulation approach on a Swedish road construction use case (original) (raw)

Gamifying Project Procurement for Better Goal Incorporation

IntechOpen eBooks, 2020

Many services that we use daily, like healthcare, infrastructures, public transport, education, and others, are provided by the public sector. These services are provided using the project procurement process. In most cases, this process has a highly complex and dynamic interaction. It leads to issues, such as information asymmetry, over-specified tenders, not efficient feedback loops, etc. As a result, projects can rarely match to the objectives of organizations. This work explores the use of participatory simulation to help holistically investigate a project procurement process to incorporate better goals of organizations. Based on case studies from the Swedish road construction field, it can be concluded that participatory simulation is an effective approach to experiment with the effects of project procurement.

Gamification of a Procurement Process for Professional Training of Public Servants

International Journal of Serious Games, 2019

Implementation and training about changes in a procurement process are complex due to the complexity of the procurement process characterised by the adaptive stakeholder network and continuously changing market rules. Traditional training approaches for procurement split the process into separate steps; however, to be able to assess all training aspects, it is important to have a holistic look at procurement. This work explores how well gamification can address the complexity of the procurement process for training specialists in the road construction sector. A case study is carried out to train new business models for both experienced specialists and new employees. The steps for the development of gamification for training in procurement are shown. A comparison of results from experienced and less experienced participants is presented. The results show the relationships amongst the complexity of the real system, the gamification design and the results of gamification.

Gamification in project management: experiences from business and training

2017

Cada vez se aplican más conceptos de gamificación o ludificación en los más diversos ámbitos desde la salud, la enseñanza, el mundo empresarial, etc. En la misma forma, se pueden aplicar estrategias de gamificación para la Gestión de Proyectos. Este documento refleja la experiencia de aplicar distintos conceptos de gamificación en la práctica como la aplicación de lego serious play en las distintas etapas de la gestión de un proyecto: iniciación, planificación, ejecución y cierre de un proyecto en una empresa de ingeniería. Igualmente se muestra experiencias de aplicación de juegos de tablero en cursos de Gestión de Proyectos.More and more concepts of gamification or ludification are applied in the most diverse areas from health, education, the business world, etc. In the same way, gamification strategies can be applied for Project Management. This document reflects the experience of applying different concepts of gamification in practice such as the application of lego serious play...

Requirements analysis gamification in legacy system replacement projects

Requirements Engineering

The replacement of legacy systems in the public sector is fraught with project delays, budgetary overruns, technological and business process complexities. Moreover, the software implemented to replace legacy systems is developed or configured to largely mimic their features and functionality in order to minimize the disruption to organizational operations that accompanies the introduction of new technology. When the requirements for legacy replacement primarily replicate existing applications and processes, opportunities for business process improvement are bypassed. However, it is difficult for practitioners to transcend the business and systems models prevalent in their organizations for many years. The challenge is to support them to overcome such a difficulty, and be creative and engaged during requirements discussions. Our research aims to evaluate the utility of gamifying the requirements activities during legacy replacement projects for scoping replacement systems efforts in a way that takes advantage of opportunities for innovation while minimizing unnecessary changes to the status quo. The supplementation of the requirements process with game elements is explored in our research through the development of a requirements discussion game (RE-PROVO) and its evaluation by practitioners in two government agencies. Our findings reveal that key elements of RE-PROVO, including competition, anonymity and roleplay, encourage a more critical evaluation of business requirements in legacy replacement projects, but that the success of requirements gamification is contingent on a proper incentivization model which takes organizational culture and values into account.

Competitive Dialogue in Norwegian Public Infrastructure Projects

Journal of Construction Engineering and Management

Competitive dialogue (CD) is a relatively new procurement procedure introduced in 2004 by the European Parliament for particularly complex contracts. The Norwegian Public Roads Administration (NPRA) has limited experience with the procedure, but they are planning to use it in several future projects. Limited research was found concerning the practical issues of CD. This paper explores the experiences of Norwegian practitioners to identify such issues and suggests measures for the success of future projects using the procedure. In addition to a literature study, a document study and twenty-two semi-structured in-depth interviews with key informants from six cases selected from the Norwegian public infrastructure projects were carried out. Both the client and the suppliers value the potential of CD. However, several challenges were identified, such as lack of practical experience with CD, ethical challenges, determining the MEAT (Most Economically Advantageous Tender) criteria, evaluation based on the MEAT criteria, and varying market interest. This paper contributes to construction engineering and management practice to increase the understanding of CD by suggesting what kinds of measures ought to be taken for the success of future projects using the procedure. Keywords-Competitive dialogue; procurement procedure; public projects; innovation; early contractor involvement. Competitive dialogue (CD) is a relatively new procurement procedure introduced in 2004 by the European Parliament for particularly complex contracts (European Commission, 2006). It a procedure that can be used to engage suppliers in the early phase of a project to support innovation (Edler and Georghiou, 2007; Korthals Altes and Taşan-Kok, 2010). In Finland, for instance, public traffic infrastructure owners have developed an alliancing project delivery method based on CD in order to implement ECI (Lahdenperä, 2009). In the Netherlands, CD and BVP have been used as approaches to implement ECI in the public sector (Van Leeuwen, 2011; Lenferink et al., 2012). Van Leeuwen (2011) explains how it is possible to combine CD with BVP to establish a procurement procedure that prioritizes qualification over price. In sum, CD has been found to enable the market to suggest innovative solutions (Kautsch et al., 2015) through the early involvement of suppliers, and to establishing an innovative public client-supplier relationship (Essig and Batran, 2005). The Norwegian Public Roads Administration (NPRA) is currently planning a mega project, the E39 Coastal Highway Route along the west coast of Norway. The project cost is estimated to be approximately 40 billion U.S. dollars. One of the main ambitions of the project is to make the E39 ferry free by replacing the eight ferry services crossing the major fjords with bridges and submerged tunnels. The fjords are up to 1,300 meters deep and 7,500 meters wide. As a consequence of the technical challenges involved, the NPRA needs to bring suppliers' knowledge and experience into the project to boost innovation. The NPRA plans using CD to achieve innovation through early contractor involvement. Public procurement regulations vary from country to country, this even if all countries in Europe should follow the EU public procurement directives. Experiences with the implementation of new procurement procedures are thus country specific. The EU directive (2004/18/EC) does not regulate in detail how CD should be conducted, nor what phases should be included in CD (European Commission, 2006). Thus, CD has been practiced in different ways in different countries. CD is a novel procurement procedure in Norway. The NPRA has used the procedure in only six projects. So far, limited research has been done on CD in the Norwegian context. Furthermore, limited international research has identified practical issues of CD.

Perceptions of stakeholders in project procurement for road construction

Cogent Business & Management

Planning transport system, building, operating and maintaining public roads and railways is typically performed by public institutions in collaboration with other stakeholders, such as manufacturers, suppliers and distributors. In many cases, this collaboration is done with a procurement process. Despite the formal nature of such process, stakeholders can have different worldviews or perceptions leading to adverse effects on the final procurement result. This article is focused on how to find perceptions of stakeholders related to roadwork-related procurement processes using Q methodology. This methodology uses data from the stakeholders and searches for factors or groups within the data of participants who have similar opinions. A specific case of road procurement in Sweden is used to test the methodology. As a result, three clusters of perceptions are found. These clusters and their interpretation can be applied to many tasks that are related to complex adaptive systems such as policy-making, strategy generation, solution testing, training and others.

Simulation Games in the Project Management Environment

Games in Operations Management, 2000

The paper describes and analyses the experiences obtained in the development of PROSIGA and TRAINER games in the project management environment. The benefits of using simulation games are presented, as well as the outlooks for further work with this type oftools. Different aspects of the games development process are commented and specifically the overall effort involved is exposed.

Enhancing Stakeholder Management Competences in Construction Projects Using Serious Games

2017

Projects are applied as a work-form in several organisations. Both public and private sectors widely adopt the project concept to create the product or service that they aim at. Projects are goal-oriented, one-time activities that have time and resource limitations. Even though projects are widely applied in modern organisations, project management is recognised as one of the more challenging tasks in business and one that requires multiple skills to master. The skills encompass technical project management skills such as resource planning and managing a budget; but also a complex mixture of soft skills such as communication, trust building and managing the stakeholders of a project. Current methods for training project managers have received criticisms that call for new approaches to support learning. One such approach is experiential learning for fresh project managers to gain a variety of project experiences in a virtual environment through serious games. This paper discusses the...

A Gamified Model for the Building Site: A Solution to Motivate Construction Wokers in Pandemic Time

JOURNAL OF BIOENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY APPLIED TO HEALTH, 2020

This article aims to present the first results of a study that investigates how construction companies can use gamification to help workers assume appropriate behaviors and motivate construction teams to achieve their production goals. It is an exploratory, empirical, qualitative research, for which the methodological approach is Design Science Research. A closed questionnaire was carried out to construction workers to understand the context of the workplace. This tool aims to investigate motivational aspects, and another questionnaire, with engineers, aims to identify which production problems to address in a proposal for a gamified model. The results show that most workers have a need to be recognized and that the proposed solution can contribute to the continuous improvement of the work environment. The article presents possibilities of using gamification in the construction environment to help workers in the prevention against COVID-19.

Applying Gamification for Mindset Changing in Automotive Software Project Management

Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2018

Changing technologies, where development time for a new work product must be decreased with each year due to a higher customer competition, also leads to a change in mindset in the way in which product development is currently done. Gamification models are one of this “game-changing” strategies that was considered suitable to also be implemented in the automotive software product development topic, but not only in this area. This paper describes the current situation in adopting on large scale the product development phases as gamified scenario, together with the presentation of the results of several questionnaires applied on automotive project team members. The aim of the paper is to present a procedure for obtaining a gamification application on an automotive project describing in detail each step which needs to be fulfilled in an iterative way. As a starting point for the model, the DMA (Design – Mechanics – Aesthetic) procedure was used, supported with elements from the PC/game...