Buy a Feature
This week myself and a few of my co-workers at Improving Enterprises had a chance to review the latest (0.8) release of the Buy a Feature online game. It was nice to see how development of the game had progressed and of course we had a lot of fun.
Buy a Feature (BAF) is a game designed to help an organization prioritize a list of items in a collaborative and fun manner. These items can be features, tasks, services, investments, or even projects within a portfolio. It is one of a collection of games cataloged by Luke Hohmann in his book Innovation Games.
BAF is the first game of several of the innovation games to be brought online. The online version of BAF enables access to wider audience, improves data collections and analysis, and makes it easier to collect more data by running more games.
The game works by creating a market place for features. Each feature in the market place has a cost (assign by the facilitator) and each participant has a certain budget to spend (also assigned by the facilitator). By setting up costs and budgets so that the total budget for all participants is less then cost for all features, and by ensuring that some features are too expensive to be purchased by any single individual, the game structure encourages participants to collaborate in buying the features most important to them.
This is a powerful and fun tool to use when confronting the task of setting priorities. I definitely recommend taking a look at the game and if you’re interested in learning more then consider picking up the book or joining one of classes on Innovation Games Luke teaches.