Game of Life

Cancer Research UK is using gamification to engage the public in the battle against tumours. Programme manager Hannah Keartland explains all. 

From a young age, Hannah Keartland, programme manager at Cancer Research UK (CRUK), has always had a project on the go – whether that’s learning to sew, exploring space or writing her own cookery book.

Her first projects, however, were a far cry from her current one, which is not just seminal for project management as a profession but for the future of scientific research, too.

Around 18 months ago, Keartland became involved in a landmark programme that began in the cancer charity’s innovation team – that of Citizen Science – which takes a crowd-sourcing approach to analysing cancer data. The programme began around two and a half years ago as a temporary project that resulted in the phenomenally successful Cell Slider product. Cell Slider is an interactive website that invites the public to help researchers by analysing images of tumours.

CRUK worked in collaboration with Zooniverse, one of the largest web developers for citizen science projects, to develop this first product, which was launched in October 2012. In the first three months of the project, the so-called citizen scientists had analysed data that CRUK researchers had taken 18 months to do – an emphatic six times faster.

“When you’re looking at the time frames that it can take to develop new cancer treatments, accelerating something by a factor of six is really exciting,” Keartland says.

Moreover, the results showed CRUK could get a similar level of accuracy from the public’s own involvement as it could from its own researchers. “That was the beginning of our journey,” she explains.

Since then, Keartland’s team has taken even greater strides, leaping into the gaming world with the launch in February 2014 of Genes in Space – which she says is the first-ever mobile game to integrate cancer data.

If Keartland and CRUK were happy with the results of Cell Slider, they were overwhelmed by the success of Genes in Space. In less than two months of the game’s life, players had done 10 years’ worth of gameplay, and the game had reached 46th place in the iTunes free apps chart. “We were completely blown away by the success of it,” she says.

Several awards later and her team has launched another game  – Reverse the Odds – which she says takes the success of Cell Slider in terms of the model for analysis and embeds it in a game. But rather than having to pay money to reach higher levels, players do bits of cancer analysis instead. The more accurate the analysis, the more potions a player wins.

It’s still early days, as the latest game only hit the market in October 2014, but “a really nice stat is that it took just two weeks to do a million classifications”, says Keartland. This compares with six months for Cell Slider and three months for Genes in Space.

“The potential to use gamification and the public in analysing data is massive,” she enthuses.

Uncharted terriroty
CRUK’s recent successes make it sound like gamification has been a pretty straightforward process for Keartland but, in reality, this kind of programme is wholly new to the charity. During the first year, Keartland was managing a virtual team of resources across the organisation and leading them into uncharted cyber/scientific territory, with the ultimate aim – if successful – of developing a long-term vision and strategy.

Keartland has achieved just this. She has taken the programme from concept stage to a permanent and expanding function within the charity – no easy feat in a not-for-profit organisation.

In March 2014, Keartland and her team – which is one of the charity’s first multifunctional teams – defined the strategy and proved to the executive board that there was “something exciting enough to really invest in”.

“We’ve got a couple of years to really prove our assumptions and understand the scientific need – and how we can develop something that is a robust, scalable solution that can have a genuine scientific impact and accelerate research. At the moment, our focus is on proving we can do that,” she explains.

Her team – “quite unusual for CRUK” – consists of three scientists, a statistician, an IT professional, a project manager, a project executive and two marketing professionals.

It has been a challenging business case to make “because you can’t put numbers on a lot of things we have to prove”, and she has tried, she says, but that’s what makes it interesting for her.

Love of projects 
Herein lay Keartland’s strengths as a programme manager, because she is also a chartered accountant. That training, she says, provided her with a solid grounding in how to make a business case, manage client expectations and work with lots of different people and organisations, as well as teaching many other basic business skills.

“I find I still use a lot of those basic accountancy skills when I am writing business cases or projects,” she says. “It’s really useful to have that background and to think big in terms of where could this go.” 

Of the Citizen Science programme, she says: “It’s a very new market and idea and we don’t know what the future looks like. It could be a function embedded in CRUK or potentially it could be something much bigger. Having that business background enables me to think more broadly.”

Her methodical yet agile approach is not exclusively applied to her projects either. She has also applied it to her career. It was a conscious decision for Keartland to train as an accountant because she understood what skills the training could furnish her with. 

Equally, she knew that, ultimately, she wanted to work in the charities sector. It was only after speaking to career consultants, however, that it became clear that “projects were the thing that I really loved”.

After a stint in tax at Deloitte, Keartland worked for Emerge Poverty Free, a mid-sized charity, where she was recruited as business and finance manager. But, as there were just eight staff members, she managed all aspects of the office, from IT and HR to marketing and finance.

“That was a fantastic experience – coming from a really big organisation to work in a small organisation where I got involved in everything. I might be reviewing marketing copy one minute and talking to a donor the next. I learned how a small charity runs,” she says.

From there she moved to Innocent Drinks, where she was hired into the finance function to support the marketing and innovation teams. At this point, she consolidated the course of her career.

“While there, it became clear that I wanted to work in the charities sector but also that I didn’t want to be in a pure finance role. I started to interface with what was called ‘projects’. And I started to understand what it was like to run something formally set up as a project.”

With her knowledge, training and background, it’s clear that Keartland would have been highly prized in the business world and handsomely rewarded for it. Yet it’s equally apparent that the opportunities Cancer Research UK offers her arguably surpass any opportunities Keartland could get in the private sector. 

Lessons learned from the citizen science programme
In terms of gaming, Keartland recognises the need to work in partnership with the experts. “We need to be that Babel Fish translator,” she says, referring to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’s fictitious animal that performs instant translations.

Keartland has worked with Zooniverse from the beginning and lately with Channel 4, Maverick TV UK and games developer Chunk to develop Reverse the Odds.

There were also some interesting lessons from Genes in Space that the team applied to Reverse the Odds, Keartland explains. “When you put something into a game, you start bringing in competitive behaviours. If someone is being competitive, the motivations they have need to be aligned with our motivations to generate good research.”

Some results were also skewed in Genes in Space because people were using their phones “as a babysitter and we know there are small children playing Genes in Space and the results are not going to be genuinely useful for research analysis”.  Keartland adds: “I’m confident we can use statistics to strip out those results, but it’s something we needed to learn and factor in.”

Her team has also learned a great deal about the life cycle of gamers’ interest in games, which is “very short”. The team is doing a lot of work to find out who is engaging with the three products, and what their motivations are for doing so.

These lessons, Keartland says, suit the culture she is trying to embed in the team, which is one of always learning and testing, following an agile methodology and not being afraid to fail. “I don’t want to make the same mistakes twice,” she says.

Free guide to gamification
To find out more on applying game thinking and techniques in the workplace, as well as how to identify the potential pitfalls, then download APM’s free Emerging Trends guide, entitled Introduction to Gamification.
The 42-page guide was written by the APM Thames Valley branch study tour team and is sponsored by training provider ILX Group. It features case studies along with practical tips. Download the guide