It seems to me that there’s a real opportunity here for some experienced game developers to get together and build project management software that incorporates these things. In addition to tracking and task recall, they also have experience in making the process of achieving goals, reaching levels, etc. enjoyable and even fun, and in the process motivating users to keep moving forward and achieve the next ones.
The notion of “gamification” has been thrown around a lot, but my sense (from my admittedly limited experience with apps that try to do that) is that much of the implementation outside gaming has tended to be rather shallow and cutesy.
But real gamers (I’m not one) seem to take gaming very seriously (while also thoroughly enjoying it) even though they not only don’t get paid to do it, they have to shell out thousands of dollars on expensive gaming rigs, video cards, and accessories, in addition to the cost of the games themselves.
It seems to me that software that gave project managers and teams even a little of that sense of excitement and motivation could really shake up the market for project management apps.
The main thing keeping that from happening is probably that really good game devs would rather keep creating games. But a few might find the challenge and the prospect of making a lot of money intriguing enough to give it shot.
I think the main thing keeping it from happening is that the game industry is filled with burnt-out developers, the tools you make games with are very different from the tools you make apps with, and the money in making video games is way better.
I’d be very interested in a more gamified approach to project management, though. Todoist does a bit of that, but they’re in the task management category, and thus are not sufficient for the needs we’re discussing.
I’m not aware of any project management tools that do gamification the way Todoist or Habitica do for task management. Frankly, Habitica is rapidly dying and gamified habits and task management is their raison d’être. It never appealed to me but it’s what my partner uses to run her life, don’t ask me how.
I’m not an expert on the platform, but I do admin Jira for work with 50 users across five teams. Do you mean filters (which are saved searches/queries)? Our team has over 250 filters, and I’ve only experienced an issue if Atlassian itself was having server-side issues. These are tied to dashboards, reports, Confluence project plans, and more.
Jira is highly flexible but overkill for individual use unless you already have experience with it to make it what you need. Otherwise, the learning curve can be steep. For teams, it’s good, but you still need to build the workflow for each team or program. Many tools are out there, and they all have pros/cons. You’ll always have to make compromises, especially when you’re taking about business vs individual needs.
I would say it’s a better tool for managing workflows and processes rather than teams. But then people should be using it to do work, pleasant and memorable experiences are not really expected there. Something which is absolutely fine, by the way. JIRA can be powerful for companies, has arguably become the standard, and while most individuals contributors are familiarised with it, it demands expertise in how the setup reflects the way teams and work are managed, otherwise it will ruthlessly surface all the flaws in the operational model in the company by becoming a big ball of tickets.
I was using filters, and I had a bug where half of the tickets that matched the query never showed up for me. I showed it to a partner of mine who owns an agency (including how to reproduce it, of course), and he told me that not only is it a bug, but if he experienced what I did he’d immediately move his entire team of Jira — and they’ve been using it for over 10 years!
You’re not necessarily wrong, but in my informal survey of business owners I know with project management software, people who use Asana are very app with the app and the processes it enables across multiple teams (but acknowledge it has some limitations), people who use Jira are happy with the process (but not the app), and people who use Notion are happy somebody else on the team is managing their Notion workflows (not a lie, they all said “Person X builds our Notion workflows, and I’m so glad, because I can’t figure out how to do anything else meaningful in this app”).
Again, these are informal surveys, but I’ve talked to developers, NPOs focused on large global shipments of religious goods, and consumer-focused business owners in the past couple weeks of varying sizes.
I have two problems with project management software:
Almost all of it seems focused on collaboration first, rather than PM. I get that it’s easier to build collaboration in sooner, rather than later, but it means that we think they’re all for teamwork. I think the teamwork is just a marketing angle. At some point, the project managers all have to spend their working days in this software, and the people doing the work just use it as a reference.
It is not necessarily true that business software can’t be pleasant. I agree it’s not the trend, but that doesn’t mean it’d have to be (I’d argue Asana is actually excellent in this regard). I know quite a few PMs who would all say they’d love if it the software they worked in every day was more pleasant.
Of course, now I have thoroughly derailed the thread.
My Things 4 predictions are that it still won’t include saved searches/filters or attachments, but that a new flow for recurring tasks will be one of the top features.
