The leader in serious games for business brings customers improved collaboration and prioritization capabilities.

Mountain View, CA – August 10, 2010. The Innovation Games® Company, the leading producer of online and in-person serious games and consulting services, today announced the integration of its software solution with Rally’s® Agile Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) solution. The integration enables users of Rally’s software solution to utilize the Innovation Games Online platform to facilitate collaboration and prioritization of user stories. The online integration allows Rally customers to take advantage of real-time, interactive, online games to solve complex collaboration and prioritization problems without the added cost or complexity of bringing participants physically together.

Rally users are able to select stories and export them into Innovation Games Online’s virtual market game Buy a Feature. They can then set up and play Buy a Feature to prioritize stories and import the results back into Rally’s ALM platform. This interaction allows users to keep pace with changing requirements and market needs.

“At Rally, we’ve always given teams the tools they need to collaborate and meet commitments,” said Ryan Martens, Rally’s founder and CTO. “This integration with Innovation Games Online gives our customers an effective and easy way to dramatically improve collaboration and prioritization during the planning phase.”

Innovation Games Online launched in July 2009, and was highlighted in a recent Forrester report (“Serious Games to Uncover Serious Requirements”) as a leader in the serious games industry for helping businesses “do work.” The online game platform currently includes four real-time Innovation Games—Buy a Feature Online, Prune the Product Tree Online, Speedboat Online and Design Your Own Visual Game. The online games are based on Luke Hohmann’s book Innovation Games®: Creating Breakthrough Products through Collaborative Play. Buy A Feature is an online prioritization game that brings together groups of users to collectively decide which product features are most valuable, while the other three games function as visual wikis, allowing participants to visually collaborate on ideation. More online Innovation Games are in the works, including games targeting mobile platforms, including the iPhone and iPad.

“The Innovation Games Company has long supported the agile community, and we’re thrilled to integrate Innovation Games Online with Rally. Thousands of companies and tens of thousands of projects worldwide use Rally’s solution to increase productivity and speed time-to-market,” said Luke Hohmann, CEO and founder of The Innovation Games Company. “The integration with Innovation Games Online can help these teams effectively collaborate and prioritize stories, ensuring the product in development keeps pace with agile’s dramatically faster pace of development.”

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About The Innovation Games® Company
The Innovation Games Company is the leading producer of online and in-person serious games and consulting services. Innovation Games® are the seriously fun way to do serious work, providing collaborative methods and tools for understanding what customers and markets need. Innovation Games® Online delivers real-time collaboration across the Internet. To learn more, visit www.InnovationGames.com.

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