My first year: Part 1

It's been almost a full year since I've started a full-time job as a producer in the games industry, and it's been quite a whirlwind ride. I've learned a number of hard lessons, met a lot of new and interesting people, and have realized how much I still have to learn in this industry. I'm going to write a series of posts discussing the things that I've learned so far this year, and set some goals and tangible steps forward in how I can try to apply from the lessons that I've learned.

In this post I'm going to talk about one of the larger issues that has stuck out in my mind in this past year:

Taking on more responsibility than you can handle.

This topic is incredibly common and can be applied to just about any job, not just jobs in the games industry. From October 2008 through mid-March 2009 has been one of the more stressful times in my work experience, and this was due to having to tackle two projects ramping up almost simultaneously. Without getting into too much detail about the projects themselves (one was canceled, the other is still unannounced), one of the projects had what might be considered a perfect storm of complications (I'll call the canceled project "Project A" and the unannounced project "Project B").

• Project A had an incredibly short timeline.
• We had to hire up very quickly.
  
• We were developing on hardware and with an engine we'd used in the past, but had never taken a project from start to finish on that platform.
• We'd never worked with our publisher or licensor before.
  

None of the above issues were anybody's fault necessarily; it just so happened that all of these complications compounded on top of each other to make for an incredibly difficult project.

In terms of how this related to me, I had to coordinate Project A, as described above, while also coordinating Project B. Between the two projects, I ended up having to spend a great deal of time during the day attending meetings and putting out fires, which led to me having to pull extra hours to finish my actual responsibilities. A number of factors that made the project so difficult were out of my hands, but there were some actions I could have taken that might have helped the team's situation.

Better meeting design

Everyone hates meetings, but it's also difficult to balance this out with making sure that everyone is communicating and has the information that they need. As a result, a lot of the time when questions came up, we would resolve them by having meetings for the relevant people. What ended up happening was that the leads and I were spending more than half, if not our entire days in meetings. Some of these meetings were vital, others were useless.

Putting out fires vs. longer term planning

In all projects, fires pop up all over the place and the general response is to put them out as quickly as possible before the fire spreads. What ended up happening was that I ended up putting out fires all day long and not spending my time focusing as much on the bigger picture and planning for the entirety of the project. I should have been more assertive in letting those fires burn a little bit, making a better plan of action, and then acting instead of being reactionary to every single fire. Keeping the bigger picture in mind was my responsibility, and I let that slip by focusing on what was loudest and most in my face.

Leads are full-time managing positions

One of the larger mistakes that I ended up making was relying on the leads of Project A to both manage their respective disciplines as well as generate actual content for the games. We had originally set out for the leads to exclusively manage, but due to the limited staffing that we had, we ended up having to lean heavily on leads to basically do two jobs. As one can imagine, this did not end well as the leads (and other team members too) had to crunch and take a hit in their work/life balance. It was very difficult to see any other clear alternatives at the time as we were interviewing as fast as we could to help offset this workload, but we also had some immovable deadlines and milestones staring us in the face.

I should have been more assertive and diligent in making sure the leads were leading, instead of leading and developing content at the same time. This mistake was by far the worst of the bunch as this affected not just people's work, but also their personal lives.

There were a number of other smaller mistakes that I made in the course of the project before it was canceled, but these were by far the biggies. In retrospect, we were quite lucky, as we had the opportunity to get paid to learn these tough lessons, and with all mistakes, the important part is making sure that one doesn't repeat them.