BA Techniques: Collaborative Games

Written by IISCM | Jun 15, 2020 1:01:14 PM

Purpose

Collaborative Games encourage the participants in an elicitation activity to collaborate in building a joint understanding of a problem or a solution.

Business Analysis Body of Knowledge® (BABOK®)

The term Collaborative game is a game with competition between the group of businesses due to the possibility of external enforcement of the cooperative behaviour. The Collaborative games are often analyzed through the framework of cooperative theory, which focus on predicting the solution, the joint actions that businesses take and the resulting collaborative solution. The cooperative game theory provides a high level approach as it only describes the structure, strategies, and payoffs that gives a solution to the collaboration. The collaborative game theory provides the sufficient information to encompass with all the possible strategies. In many instances, the information is available to accurately model the formal procedures available during the strategic bargaining process. The resulting model will give a solution that is practical in the real world.   

Collaborative games often benefit from the involvement of a neutral facilitator who helps the participants to understand the rules of a game and enforce those rules. The facilitators job in the collaborative game is to keep the game moving forward and to ensure that all the players have a role to play. The activities such as moving sticky notes, scribbling on white boards, drawing pictures help the people to overcome inhibition, foster creative thinking, and thinking laterally. It refers to several structured techniques inspired by game play and are designed to facilitate collaboration. The shared experience of the collaborative game encourages people with different perspectives on a topic to work together in order to better understand an issue and develop a shared model of the problem which generates a potential solutions of the problem.

Some of the articles related to Collaborative Game techniques are as follows,

 https://openreview.net/pdf?id=ByzcS3AcYX

The collaborative game involve the players in designing and deciding the activities. The players will gain the organizational benefit if the activities are geared towards developing peoples own potential. The collaborative games can be trite for many people that the activities help them to learn and develop in the areas of interest. At the end of the collaborative game, the facilitator and participants work through the results and determine the decisions that need to be taken as the result of what the participants have learned.

List of Collaborative Games used in the Organization are,

  • Office Trivia Game - Create a list of questions regarding the domain and see the answers provided by the team so that we get to know how well the team understand the domain. This game will improve the problem solving capability and the knowledge of the team.
  • Back-to-Back Drawing - It is a creative communication team game that will make the employees to communicate about the domain freely with all other co workers. This game focus on improving the verbal communication and listening skills of the employee.
  • The Barter Puzzle - It is just like the jigsaw puzzle, where the team will have to make the decisions under pressure and get to collaborate as a team. This game promotes the discussion and interaction within the team to finish the job.
  • Follow the Leader- This is one of the team building activities that will require the entire team to work together as one team. It improves the cooperation skills between the team mates, builds the trust as well as the leadership.

Advantages of using this technique are,

  • It encourages the creative thinking by stimulating the mental processes
  • It challenges the team members who are normally quite to take a more active role in the team activities.
  • It reveal the hidden assumptions of the team about the domain they are working.

Some of the books for Collaborative Game techniques,