We play seriously at the Pas-de-Calais Departmental Council!
It is with great pleasure that we are meeting Thierry Gourlain today. Thierry is Internal Communication Officer at the Pas-de-Calais Departmental Council (CD62).
He is the first of our clients to have implemented the game "Les aventuriers de la Digital Workplace" as part of the redesign of the CD62 Intranet site.
An innovative approach that he shares with us in this interview.
HAP (Hoang-Anh Phan, pre-sales consultant): Can you quickly remind us of the context of the CD62 project and your motivations for implementing the game as part of this project?
TG (Thierry Gourlain): The Pas-de-Calais Department had an intranet with the following functionalities: directory, corporate news and a document sharing solution in closed spaces. The commitment of the general management team was to open the intranet, open sharing spaces, make most content public a priori and manage reserved access on a case-by-case basis. The challenge is to develop collective intelligence and boost innovation by advancing all agents in terms of mastery and skills.
During the JClub of June 2018 (Club utilisateurs Jalios), I could not attend the workshop to present the game but the fact of knowing that it existed aroused my curiosity. I immediately saw that it could be useful to me both to prepare for the arrival of the new intranet among managers and above all to support its launch.
HAP: In practice, how is the game used? What are the principles of the game?
TG: So we published a game booking table. Nearly 8,000 intranauts are involved. They are spread throughout the Department, within 8 territories. As soon as 16 people are ready, we program a "serious game" animation. We are fortunate to have a student on an apprenticeship contract and an intern (2 months) who go on site to facilitate the game with one of the collaborative space administrators. This allows the facilitator to share his mission, his role with his colleagues and of course, it allows to present in a playful way the different functionalities of JPlatform.
The game consists of a board featuring 4 families of uses (collaboration, communication, capitalization and productivity) as well as a set of cards, each card describing a functionality of the platform. The game is played in team rounds and in general we manage to do 3 rounds of the board in 1h30. In many cases, we provide a computer and a video projector to show participants the features in their collaborative space.
Depending on the participants, we simplify or complicate the rules of the game. Sometimes the game takes up more space than the presentation of the collaborative space and sometimes the participants need concrete demonstrations. The game then becomes a pretext for training.
We also sometimes have to adapt the rules of the game to the audience we have in front of us. We have selected 8 maps with basic features that can be found on the home page. They are the first round of the game. Then we can introduce more advanced features.
HAP: What is the result after several serious game animations?
TG: The term serious game has discouraged some of them. We had remarks like: "we are an administration, we have to speak French! "serious game? Because you think we have time to play? We're overwhelmed! ». We had to explain that this is a training method.
However, after a few weeks of use, we decided to multiply even more serious games so much this animation comes in addition to the JGuides, the self-learning tutorials that we have made available on the platform. Self-learning works from the moment you explain it and take the time to discuss the different functionalities of the new tool.
Quite often agents come to the game workshop with a critical look and discourse on the new tool. In the end, they leave with a state of mind that is more focused on curiosity and the desire to test. On the same day, we notice that the agents have completed their profile, configured their notifications, published a post, liked, commented or recommended content...
HAP: What use of the game do you see in the future and what would you like to see in the next version of the game?
TG: We have created a level 1 course; not yet having JLearn (Jalios' Social Learning module), we have created a wiki with links to the basic JGuides (essential features to get started). We have grouped our JGuides by "missions" as in the game: communication, collaboration and new missions for us: capitalization and productivity. This provides a link between the different media and discourses. We would rather talk about efficiency than productivity.
What would be nice is to be able to couple this game with a catalogue of features and uses; that players can find the maps and the definition of the features. They could thus use it as a glossary but also as a gateway to the various JGuides for example.
In a space "let's build the intranet together" everyone can give ideas to improve it... so they contribute to advancing the mission of collaboration, efficiency or capitalization for example... The idea of developing the intranet together goes beyond the very framework of the tool. It is the state of mind of agents that is changing: search for innovation, simplification, improvement...
At Jalios, we also have at heart this same co-construction approach with our customers, whether for the development of the JPlatform solution, or for the development of this game. So thank you again Thierry for your time, your energy and your feedback! See you soon for a new episode of the "Adventurers of the Digital Workplace"!
