This talk was an overview of rapid team growth from a producer's perspective. Gave example of organizing bigger teams over various projects. Used Fear 2 project as the example project. Overnight, it went from a team of 22 to a team of about 60.
Having middle producers in a large team "can create a bad Chinese whispers-style communication line".
Core rule set for effective communication
· Know your subject
o Don’t bullshit
o Facilitate the people who know the subject to communicate with each other
· Trusto No trust, no listening, break down in communication
o Build trust by being honest. Even the painful stuff.
o Be as transparent as possible. News filters very quickly – let people understand how you got from point A to point B.
o Treating everyone with respect.
o Follow up – make sure if you task someone to do something, that it’s followed up.
· Consistency o Getting communicators on the same page.
o Be consistent with communication and be on message.
o If there are disagreements make sure you come to consensus and then run with that.
o When there is huge dissent make sure you talk through it and come through to some sort of understanding.
o Inconsistency is one of the easiest ways to break trust.
· Up & Down communicationo You need people in the trenches moving forward at all times, so you need to make sure they are in the information loop.
o You need upper management in the loop so they don’t keep messing with you at the last minute.
- Forgetting to effectively communicate upwards is the #1 issue many producers screw up.-
- A friend described working with upper management as trying to "Avoid the Eye of Sauran" In other words this guy’s management group wasn’t effectively managing upwards.
· Core RulesAdapt – as a producer you are dealing with lots of different types of people. For example. People who don’t open emails – if you know he doesn’t have email open you need to find another way to adapt and communicate to the people you have.
o Get to the point as quickly as possible
o Summarize at the start when presenting or in meetings, move on to the meat later.
- This is important when managing down since you don’t want to waste the time of the doers in your team.
- Equally important is communicating upwards, as the amount of data grows hierarchically when moving up the ladder. Sumarize!
· Full team involvemento Make sure your team know why descisions are being made
o Include many people in the descision process where possible.
- Doesn’t mean giant meetings.
· Targets?o Identify core communicators in your team.
- These are the conduits for communication to flow up and down. Use this to your advantage. People who have trust with team.
o Communication must start and end with the people who are getting the work done. These are the ones you really need to ensure are being communicated with.
· Classifying Communicationo Active vs passive (push) communication.
- Active is when the user is pulling data and getting data for themselves.
- Push is when data is getting sent to you (eg. IM, email). Push becomes noise super fast (eg.email)
· Types of Communicationo Face to face
o Larger meetings
- Ensure they are goal oriented
- Send out agenda first
- Keep them short. Anything over an hour is painful!
- http://tobytripp.github.com/meeting-ticker/
- Must ensure there is FOLLOW UP
o IM
- All external IM clients are not secure.
- This speaker uses ‘spark’ – internal IM client.
o Prioritized hit lists
- This project created a bunch of strike teams – figure out what you need to do for that day or week and will post it to the wiki. So everyone at a glance can see what everyone across the department is working on.
o Game play throughs
- Goal oriented
- Send out agenda first
· What are we playing?
· What are we evaluating?
· What type of feedback is required?
· keep them as short as possible.
· Documentation o Everything they do is on their Wiki. Great way to communicate to those outside the strike teams.
o They use ‘CONFLUENCE’ which works well with JIRA
- Forums
- Push notification
- Can embed and edit excel and word documents.
· Status updates (weekly)o It can be really long, but keep simple and break it down. Mostly combine all related updates from teams.
* Executive summary
· Key personnel
· Key dates
· Upcoming dates
* Updates
· Main things changed from past week
* Issues and risks
* Key Dates
· Milestones etc.
* Discipline updates
· Updates divided by physical groups
* Strike team updates
* Fully fleshed out risk list
· Go into much further depth for risks
* Deliverables
Example of team; "Fear 2"
- identify features (audience ambience, weaponry etc)
- identify strike teams (and each strike team lead)
o strike teams take full ownership of feature
o smaller more manageable teams
o decisions were not bottle necked with a few key individuals
o not everyone created equal – there was an approval process.
- Main push o 4 level strike teams
o floating content strike team to supported other teams. Acted as consultants.
o Also acted as ‘contractors’.
o A good mix of junior and senior folks. Had to be self sufficient and self motivated. One person who knows the technology and also understand how the team works.
o Approvals process
* Play throughs of level at predetermined intervals or when the team asked him.
* One on ones with principal designers if issues popped up
* Each week a level was singled out for the team to play.
· There is no stronger motivation than peer disappointment! (peer accountability)
· Empower people to push their peers into a better place
· Anything that could be broken down into functional group we broke it down
o Weapons
o Characters
o UI
o Core Combat etc.
· Had owners called Strike Team leads
o Had a face to face each morning with each other to triage bugs and issues across all of the strike teams.
o Figured out who was finished and what was needed.
· End Game
o Still level based
o Polish team
o Performance
o Memory certification
o End of game had DAILY PLAY THROUGHS from 4-5
What did they learn?
· Empowerment!
o Give people tools and support they need to make cool shit.
o Identify core individuals as shit filters and course correctors.
· Identify and rely on key individuals
o Trusted by rest of team
o Small leadership roles
o “Pony express”
· Trenches-style camaraderie and ownership = high moral on a project that could have been painful.
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