Play These Fun Games

Are your sales or project management meetings getting stale? Need some fresh ideas for more interaction and engagement? Try these games out in your company to encourage ownership and growth, and to increase greater company wins!

How to save or make money on projects:

Play this game in your project management meetings when all the attendees have a money mindset present. Announce that you are simply going to go around the table and ask each person how they can save or make money on a project. The only rules are that Change Orders are off limits (because most PMs default to this being the only way to make money), and that when it is your turn, you have five seconds to answer (in order to keep the game moving and to start to eliminate some people in order to reach the end). All that is needed for each answer is a couple words – no need to explain. It should be at the pace of brainstorming. Have an administrator help record ideas during the session. The winner is the last one to blurt out an answer within the 5 second rule. In addition to bragging rights, you can announce that there will be some other monetary prize for the winner as motivation for participation and thinking hard. You could even have a team prize such as pizza at the next meeting or something that fits your culture if the group can get more than 100 bullet items. Hint: you can afford to have a pretty attractive prize here, as, if only 10% of this list gets incorporated in future projects, you’ll pay for that prize a hundred-fold over!

After the winner is determined, ask; “How many times are we saddled with a bad project from sales or estimating and just conclude that it is destined to be a bad job financially and there is nothing that can be done to save it? Well now, we have a giant list of tactics to put to use to try to recover with”. Circulate this list with everyone, and store it in a place where everyone can find it easily. On occasional future meetings, you can bring up this list again and ask for examples of who is incorporating some of these ideas. After some time when there is a majority of new people in this meeting, it can be repeated so this new group can call these their own and feel some personal connection to and ownership of. Record some notes in the original meeting as to what improvements could be made for this game in your specific organization for the future repeat occasions. Even though the content that the group creates may not be of the same quality as a textbook from academic professionals, the real value here is the thought process, accountability, and ownership that comes with peer participation. This experience will definitely stick with participants much longer than the content from reading a book.

Conduct a Pre-mortem

This is similar to above, but you can think of it as the opposite. While the above version may be best to conduct before very tight projects, this Pre-mortem version might be best for fat projects where individuals could become lazy and complacent, thinking nothing could possible go wrong.

In this game version, the leader paints a very vivid and emotional image of the future. Start with painting a picture of the state of the world in a time frame right after this project is complete. Include something personal about a participant to make an emotional connection. “Imagine yourself in March, 20XX, we’ve elected a new president, and Sarah here (who is currently expecting) has seen her child take their first steps in their new home.” Continue this until everyone feels this future emotional state. Then, bring the project into vision and make it negative – something shocking that no one expects, because everyone thinks it is going to be an easy, slam-dunk project. “Our project is complete, but we lost 8 percentage points of margin, our customer hates us, and we had multiple safety incidents. How could this have happened?” And the game begins. Each person around the table has to give an example as to what would have led to these results. There will be answers such as; “We didn’t communicate”, or “We didn’t listen to the customer”. There will be plenty of uncomfortable answers that everyone will think; “This couldn’t really happen to us on this project, could it?” The same five-second rule applies as above. Finally, after the winner is awarded, ask the group; “Now, we are back in the present, and none of these negative outcomes have happened yet. How do we ensure these scenarios do not happen on our job?” The answer is obvious; ensure none of the items on this list plays out, and work to do the opposite of them. The more of an emotional connection and vivid description you can paint for the participants, the more impactful this exercise will be.

How to sell projects at a premium

This is very similar to the first game of “How to save or make money on projects”, but performed with the sales team, with the same rules and method of play. Hopefully, everyone hears new ideas to try out (none of us are as smart as all of us), but the real value again is the thinking process and ownership of these ideas to the group. They can be revisited occasionally in sales meetings and there could be discussion about how each person is using some of these new ideas. For extra impact, try to find one or two people before who have had success and let them elaborate in front of everyone to demonstrate the success and spread this peer pressure.

Why do I like my favorite vendor or subcontractor

This game could be played with different groups, such as sales, project managers, and preconstruction. The idea here is to go around the table and simply ask the group; “Why do you like working with your favorite vendor or subcontractor?” The same play rules apply as above. After you have run out of ideas  and have crowned a winner, ask the group; “Now, how many of these tactics and strategies do you apply to your customer?” The answer and impact is again obvious. Like the other lists, this could be revisited occasionally with the group to ask about examples of how we are using these bullet items with their customers.

These are several examples of games that encourage creative group participation, growth, ownership, camaraderie, peer pressure and friendly competition. Participation is much more important than quality of answers, as ownership and recollection of good ideas is much better than forgetting or not even making note of great ideas. These fun games will push your groups and company to the next level. What other ideas for future games will your groups come up with that fit your company culture?