Hello again!

This is Per-Emil coming back with some more thoughts on project management and why I do it how I do it. To me, valuable “leadership” is when everyone in the project can feel that they have contributed towards the end goal, have had their opinions heard and that the time they’ve spent completing tasks feels useful.

We’ve all been working for hours on that one or section of features only to have it all thrown out because of changes in direction - and it kind of sucks.
Software development and game creation WILL always be subject to rapid change due to the speed at which decisions often have to be made, the discoveries and solutions you never knew you would stumble upon and of course the very nature of creative minds working together.

But if you as a manager tell someone to work on specific features, it is your responsibility to make sure that the time wasted is minimized. This is important not only from an economic standpoint (since time wasted == money wasted) but also from a social point of view where making people feel included and valuable will increase their overall feeling of importance and thus their investment in the project.

What I personally try to do to handle this is to make sure that everybody has something tangible to work on all the time, and when there is no specific task to perform, I ask them to do research on the fields that will have to be used in the future. No one in the team can know and be great at every aspect needed to complete a project, but we can all work together and focus on areas that will increase the team’s collective knowledge.
As a project manager, it is my responsibility to make sure everyone have tasks beneficial to the project to perform at all times, but it is absolutely not my project and me who gets to decide everything that will go into the game. It is very important to distinguish the management role from that of a creative director. What a project manager often will have to do though is cut ideas and features to make sure the project stays within its designated scope.

Early tasks for upcoming sprint

Wouldn’t it be great if we could do everything we wanted all the time? Yes, yes it would!
But time is often the first resource to run out in this very real game of life that we all play.
For this project I will use Hack’n’Plan to split the project into manageable tasks which can be distributed amongst or picked by members of the team. Previously I have used Trello and PivotalTracker for this and the workflow is pretty much the same, but the layout and UI differs somewhat.

Agile is a methodology for project planning where the project is broken down into small “stories” which are then graded in points (or time) by the amount of work & complexity they require. I will cover what I’ve learnt so far about this subject more in-depth in a future post!

// Per-Emil