Like Darkest Dungeon but for Work

January 17, 2018 7:40 PM

I am looking for a team/employee management tool that is as fun to use as the party/estatement management screens in Darkest Dungeon (or any other well made RPG adventure party type games). Or, more boringly, I'm looking for a CRM but for teams/employees.

I manage a team of high performers. They are great! I seriously love working with them, and I want to be a better manager by keeping better track of some very specific things, like:

-Skill levels
-Stuff they enjoy working on, stuff they hate working on
-How much time they have taken off (so I can tell them to take time off and not get burnt out)
-Weird things that might not be relevant today, but might be relevant someday
-Important discussions we have had that I want to be able to come back to later
-Goals
-Metrics

I already have a lot of these things, but they are spread out in text files, notebooks, excel sheets, tracking tools I've built over time, in-house tools, etc...and I've reached a point where I want to consolidate ALL of these into one place, one thing that I can always have at the ready.

If I had my druthers, I would have something akin to the Darkest Dungeon interface, but for my team:

- Quests would be projects
- Character sheets would be where their skills and goals and things go
- Sending them to the sanitarium/tavern/etc would be like telling them to take some PTO, or sending them to a training or what have you

I've searched and searched, but I can't find anything that seems to fit the bill. Most of it is very HR/Payroll/Talent Management focused and doesn't seem to have all of these features in one place. I want it to be fun, and streamlined, and be like an extension of what I do.

I am seriously thinking about building it myself (e.g. I started to prototype it in Airtable), but I would love, love, love if there was already something out there that works like this. Also, it doesn't have to be "gamified" or video-game-esque per se, the key ask here is that it's like a CRM for me to manage my relationship with my team members better.

posted by Doleful Creature to Work & Money (6 answers total)

You might want to look into Trello. It's very slick and super flexible, the boards/cards paradigm can easily be adapted to your RPG party management metaphor, there's a ton of automation possible, IFTTT integration, mobile/desktop/browser experiences are all synced, and much more...
posted by naju at 4:01 AM on January 18, 2018 [1 favorite]

Habitica checks a few of those boxes (but certainly not all)
posted by chrisamiller at 5:57 AM on January 18, 2018

I dunno but I see a business opportunity here. Seems to me there are millions of people out there who would love to have an RPG-esque (and skinnable!) interface for this stuff, from both employee and manager ends.
posted by SaltySalticid at 7:24 AM on January 18, 2018

I don't know of an app that exists, but I think this sounds like it would be fun to make.
I'll add it to my projects! Perhaps a small web app is in the future! (I am a software developer)
posted by lalunamel at 8:07 PM on January 18, 2018 [1 favorite]

I was looking at Lighthouse for this, for my team. I LOVE the RPG-themed idea, though. :)
posted by culfinglin at 3:59 PM on January 19, 2018

I also thought of Trello for this. I use it to manage my work, but here's a D&D use case!
posted by Threeve at 5:26 PM on January 19, 2018 [1 favorite]