Up Sh*t Creek: Pro Tips for Managing the Unmanageable Project

[Music] okay so it's about time to start first I want to say thank you so much for coming today it's great to see you all before we begin I've been asked to remind you all to please mute your phones if you'd be so kind and also to fill out the surveys which I believe they're going to email to you at the end of this talk so I'm guessing that most people sitting here in the audience are either producers or project managers or that way inclined in some way so who better than a roomful of production people to appreciate the goodness of a post mortem right so any feedback you have for me good or bad I would really appreciate it and that goes for all the speakers here at GDC so thank you in advance for that so with all that business out of the way I just want to say welcome to up creek Pro tips for managing the unmanageable project I got to give a little shout out to the GDC advisory board for letting me use that title cuz I was not entirely sure they would find it quite as amusing as I

did but I've got to keep it real because this is GDC and it's production so before we begin I want to take a moment to frame the discussion a little bit around what I mean when I'm talking about the unmanageable project just a small aside I think Melissa McCarthy is spicy is gonna keep me alive for the next four years that's how I'm gonna survive so I want to frame the conversation a little bit around what I mean when I'm talking about the unmanageable project because it could be an entire game project or it could be a piece of a project it could be a critical feature that needs to go out really quickly it could be a piece of the content pipeline that's really screwed up and is potentially dragging down the schedule of the entire project or it could be a demo like a demo for GDC for example I'm sure a lot of you have had demo deadlines that you've been dealing with or e3 or PACs so it could be any one of a number of things but in the context of the unmanageable project

it usually tends to meet three additional criteria so one is that these projects tend to be high risk and therefore present a clear opportunity for failure I know a lot of you probably think well projects present a clear opportunity for failure but that's not necessarily true I've been on a lot of projects where it's it's not the end of the world if you're a little bit late or if you're a little bit over budget but in some cases it is the end of the world so another hallmark is that there are often heavily resource-constrained and in the context of this particular conversation the resource I'm talking about specifically its time because you can always add people you can always add budget but when you can't add time sometimes that presents a particular set of challenges and there are also clear consequences for failure so this could be anything from you don't launch the project on time you might not get a promotion or maybe your team won't get their bonus or maybe your team will be

fired or maybe the project will be defunded so there is usually pretty clear consequences to the project going sideways of this type so if you haven't already been handed one of these I just have to say brace yourself because if you spend any amount of time in the games industry you will be put in charge of one of these projects a chaotic project with a crazy deadline and it's going to be your job to get it back on track so that's the bad news the good news is I've spent many years of my career running these kinds of projects and I have to say in my experience there's always a way to figure out how to get a project back on track as long as you're willing to adopt a particular mindset to make that happen and that mindset I also want to add does not always necessarily involve crutch so we'll talk about that a little bit later so this is probably a good point to introduce myself my name is Amy Dallas I'm one of the cofounders of clutch play games out of Portland Oregon I'm also on the board of directors of oh go which is

the Oregon games organization and this year I'm also excited to say I'm on the Advisory Committee for the Austin games conference so if anybody has any interesting production talk so you want to present they're trying to see me that's in late September and I hope to see a lot of you there because it's going to be a really cool show so a little bit about clutch play so we're an indie dev studio as I mentioned we're up in Portland we're all a bunch of Triple A vets who used to live down the bay area we came from Studios like EA Sports EA Games Max's 2k storm front and Ji moko DNA so we all have a lot of big game experience and we moved to Portland in search of affordable housing reasonable commutes really good beer wine and you know coffee so what more do you want in life with those things but there isn't a lot of games industry up there so we mainly work with companies down here and we're

kind of known as as like a SEAL team of development we get brought into projects that have a particular set of needs that are really challenging and we basically like dive off the ship with a knife in the mouth and we go take care of business and then we get out and go on to another project so because all of us have a lot of games industry experience and triple-a experience we're pretty unfazed by difficult projects and we all like them but I'd say of everyone on my team I like these projects the most and this is actually something that I never really thought I was gonna like doing because you know who wakes up as a kid and goes you know what I want to do I want to run a bunch of really shitty hard projects for my entire career nobody actually says that when they start out in games but for me my love of really crazy projects began on The Sims 2 quite a long time ago so when I came onto that project I was put in charge of the animation pipeline and I did not know this but several producers had run screaming from that particular pipeline

before me because it was pretty messed up it was functionally months behind all the rest of the other discipline groups and every day they got more behind and so it was my job to fix it and at points that seemed really really impossible and so I had to come up with some creative ways on how to do that I'll talk about at least one of those a little later on that could be a whole talk in and of itself but at the end kind of amazingly we went from being the team that was most behind to the team that actually we were the only ones who finished a week early so that was kind of an amazing accomplishment and it really showed me wow you know even though something seems possible there is a way around it you can't actually fix it but for me personally I was like it this is terrible this is an absolutely like the most painful project I've ever been on I'm gonna leave games I'm gonna move to Portland and that's gonna be the end of my life and games and something really interesting happens a bit a lot of you will know this if you've ever tried to leave games it's like the Mafia you've

never really are able to leave it sucks you back in and I think one of the reasons for that is when you work in the games industry for any length of time it kind of perverts your brain in a very specific ways such that when you try to live like a normal person that just feels really weird and boring so when I moved to Portland and there were no game jobs I went up there and I started working for a web dev and software dev and active companies and I thought oh this will be great and I really had a hard time with it because it was so incredibly boring I've come to think of this as like The Hurt Locker effect so I don't know if you guys remember that scene from The Hurt Locker if you've if you've watched that movie but he's a bomb defusing specialist and he's used to things blowing up all the time and everything's crazy and then he comes home and has this existential crisis in the middle of the grocery store because the hardest decision he has is I have to pick out cereal and there's too much cereal and that felt really weird him and that's that's how I felt and so to

combat that I became the person who specialized in taking on the scariest most painful high stakes projects and the job I had right before I came back to games was literally a job where people would bring their their projects to us and say if you can't fix this I'll be fired so super fun super fun client interactions there but because I took a lot of these projects I've spent many years teaching people how to run these kinds of projects so in doing so I've noticed that in order to be successful in my experience it does as I mentioned involved adopting adopting a certain mindset so I want to talk about three elements of that mindset and the skills around that and those are fear management expectation management and chaos management let's talk about fear first so I think fear management is

a really interesting part of the project management and production process because in order to believe in order to take on a project that's in really bad shape or is particularly challenging in some way you have to believe first that it's possible you have to really internalize that there is a way to solve that problem and that you are going to be the person who figures out how to do that so that takes a huge amount of confidence and I gotta say it's really hard to maintain that level of confidence when you're staring down the barrel of potential failure and these projects always have an element of potential failure about them and so I think it's kind of interesting that we as an industry don't really talk about fear that much and that's that seems weird to me because fear is is legit it's up there with death and spiders apparently I think it's actually just as a side note really funny that public speaking is higher than death in the list of human fears so maybe factored that into your surveys

when you're thinking about I am facing a fear greater than death as we speak oh but the thing about fear of failure is it can be really paralyzing I don't know if you guys have ever been in that situation but I certainly have been in points where I think oh my gosh this this really might not work I'm shutting down because I just don't even know what to do next we've we've probably all been in that situation so I think it's really funny that we don't talk about it more we're willing to talk about stress but where does stress come from well often it comes from fear it comes from fear that you're gonna fail that you're gonna lose your job that you're not good enough that you don't have the skills that people are going to support you all these different things so why is it that we don't talk about fear in the world of production well I think often we don't talk about it because quite frankly this is a really competitive industry and it's definitely got a survival of the fittest vibe and so admitting anything other than pure perfect confidence is

often you know fear it's gonna be perceived as weakness so also can we can be kind of concerned that admitting any kind of weakness or fear in a project will create a perception that were somehow unworthy of the job it's a disqualifying thing and last but not least I found this with with mentoring a lot of producers a lot of people when they're freaked out about a project they don't want to admit it because they think there's something wrong with them that they're so nervous because they look at other people who look so calm and and they think oh god they're so calm and I'm a wreck inside so something must be wrong with me and there's a good reason for that often as producers we kind of have to front a lot we're always under a lot of pressure to play it cool and calm especially in the face of chaos and this is never more true than when you're running a really high risk high stakes project it's not unlike the role that a flight attendant plays on a really turbulent flight in fact on my way down

here from Portland as we were coming into San Francisco we had like 20 minutes of really terrifying turbulence and the first thing I did was look at the flight attendant I'm like because she's calm it's cool because I'm a nervous flier but if she looked in any way scared I'd be like reaching under my seat to get the flotation device you know it's really you do need to have that sort of center point of calm and that's often the role that we're in whether we feel it or not so feeling fear and looking at other people who don't seem to feel fear that is not necessarily indicative of you know the fact that that they're not feeling it also but there's actually another reason why someone might not appear to feel fear and that could be that they might be suffering from a cognitive bias known as dunning-kruger effect and I don't know how many of you have ever heard of dunning-kruger effect if you've not heard of it go look that up tonight you will not regret it it is really really interesting when I first heard of

it I'm like wow there's an actual name for that that is really cool so dunning-kruger effect is actually the result of a study from David Dunning and Justin Kruger in the Department of Psychology at Cornell University and according to their study they found that ability individuals can often overestimate their skills and abilities whereas paradoxically they also found that high ability individuals often underestimate their skills and abilities that's often where impostor syndrome comes from is people under estimating what they're actually capable of doing so the fact that you might be feeling dealing with some fear on your project or self-doubt isn't necessarily the sign that something's wrong with you it often is a sign that you're actually pretty smart but you know what you're doing in fact not too long ago my team and I were actually in what you would arguably say was the pitch meeting of a lifetime with a pretty pretty major company on a project that we really wanted to land and they have a very ambitious timeline and and scope and so after laying all

that out for us the VP in the room turned to me and said well Amy is the producer are you scared by anything you heard and my two business partners were sitting across the table from me like beaming thoughts into my head going don't screw this up don't screw this up they weren't really worried I was gonna say the wrong thing and I said the only thing that I could say which was a little worried a little scared sure there's a lot of things that are scary about this and instantly I got a lot of head nods of approval like yes that is fair enough and so we ended up talking about some of the things that I found scary about what they were trying to do and how we would work around those and how we would mitigate those risks and we did go on to end up getting that project and afterwards someone came out to me and said I'm really glad you were willing to admit that you found that scary because if you hadn't we probably would have just ended the conversation because it really would have indicated that you didn't know enough or you were too cocky to admit that there are some scary elements to this project so it's

not necessarily a terrible thing to embrace the fear in fact fear actually there's a lot of upsides to it it does serve a purpose so the reason why fear exists is to keep us out of harm's way so if you look at it from a historical perspective the reason why I came you know we're here today is that our caveman ancestors if they saw a bear they ran in the opposite direction instead of going hey you looks fuzzy give me a hug that would have resulted in death so fear does serve a purpose it's there to actually clarify when there's a potential problem and it also can be really instructive I find on a lot of the projects that I run there that are really tight turn scary projects the thing that actually scares me the most is almost always the thing that ends up going sideways and that needs the most attention so whatever is keeping me up at night is the thing that I know is going to turn into the problem so it's

actually really useful because usually by the time that thing becomes a problem I've spent so much time thinking about it and worrying about it and planning for it to go wrong that I actually am able to really decisively address it and last but not least fear can be a really potent driver of success I find this particularly when we've done some of our own projects at clutch play there are times when that I find the team is stagnating they're stuck they're stuck in a perfectionism loop so anybody who battles with perfectionism knows exactly what I'm talking about and so one of the things I found that has actually really helped my team is to get over this is to inject the possibility of a failure point so basically if I find that something is stagnating I'll sign us up for a conference in three weeks to demo the game and I'm like wow we have to make this work because we've got three weeks and I find that that actually really helps to clarify the mind around what is

the best thing that we can make in the time we have versus what is the most perfect thing that I can make so that's another upside of fear because you got to have crazy cats in your slides so one final thought on fear is that I've talked a lot about you know how producers like production fear how we often feel when we're dealing with a difficult project but fear has a tendency to boil over and on a really critical fast turn high risk project fear is felt all throughout the entire team so that can boil over both on your team and levels above you like your boss or your boss's boss or your client and when that happens people often turn on each other it happens a lot especially when you're the producer you are often like in the cross hairs of people freaking out so it's really critical to remember

that often if you're in a really stressful project situation a stressed-out as you can feel others on your team may actually be feeling it far more acutely than you are so it's really important to keep that in mind and not take it personally so I find if a member of my team is freaking out more often than not the most successful way to defuse their fear or anger or stress is to just listen to them ideally recognize that they're about to boil over before they do but generally speaking more often than not if I if I can actually sit down and talk to a team member who's who's really freaking out because they're stressed out and worried just actually talking things through will help to defuse the situation quite a bit and also I often learn something really important that I didn't know so sometimes people on the team when it's really stressful they hold things in and they don't share until they freak out so the other thing the other kind of stress that can be really

painful when people sort of act out is when that stress is actually being displayed by someone who is in a position of power above you your boss your boss's boss your client and that can happen a lot that certainly happened to me quite a bit when I was dealing with clients who were facing losing their jobs if I couldn't get their project out of the door and it's it's really tricky when that happens because that often comes in the form of harsh criticism micromanagement and questioning your abilities as a producer or project manager and that is really really rough so the one piece of advice I can give is that if this happens to you the best thing you can do if you were on a really high stress high turn project is just deal with it head on and talk it out and I've had the same conversation over and over again because I have been dealing with a lot of stressed-out people and often what I found is effective is having the conversation that I understand you're

really stressed we're all super stressed but we're all on the same team and in order for me to actually do my job and manage this project you need to me to be as confident as I can possibly be so nitpicking and micromanaging is not a way to accomplish that so we need to partner up and 100% of the time that has actually gone down really effectively because it is a good reminder to them that they need you to be confident and they need to have some faith in your abilities so again a little reminder courage is resistance to fear it's not the absence of fear so here's gonna happen it's not the end of the world embrace it and and go make great stuff so next thing I want to talk about is expectation management when it comes to managing the unmanageable project you know again my experience there's always a way to do it but a lot of this involves really extremely careful

planning and expectation management and that's often easier said than done so I want to talk about three components of expectation management and those are planning scope and schedule control and communication so let's start by talking about planning first because that's one of the more critical elements of expectation management's I think and I have no doubt whatsoever that everybody in this room has a pretty good grasp of the basics of running a project in fact probably a lot of you could teach me a thing or two but as someone who spent large chunks in my career taking over this specific type of project and getting them back on track I want to talk about some things that I've observed in the planning phase that can really cause problems down the line so when you're running a high-risk faster and project it is incredibly important that everyone on your team is bought in to the goals of the project

that they understand what their personal responsibilities are on that project that they understand the risk and they've really internalized the consequences for failure and I know this seems like a big fat duh well everybody knows that we need to you know make these things clear but a lot of the projects I've taken over that have gotten into a freefall state often actually were the result of people not being clear on all of these things so important to make sure everybody is really aware of the parameters upfront so this is a big one for the games industry I have to say in particular succumbing to the urge to act first and plan later I'm a big fan of the phrase measure twice and cut once especially when you're planning a project that is very time constrained but that I'll also fully admit that as time bears down on you as producers we often feel really intense pressure to just throw open the

doors and get everybody to run as fast as they can on the team towards you know the goal of getting the project done but the problem with that is if you don't have a solid plan in place getting everybody to just run as fast as they can means that it's very likely that you're gonna take a wrong turn along the way that's gonna take some time to get you back on track and that might be time that you don't actually have another challenge of succumbing to acting first and planning later is that it often leaves you open to some pretty intense scope creep so if you don't have a really clear list of objectives and tasks that everybody's aware of then it really does leave you vulnerable to people saying well I thought that was in there and it doesn't say it's not so you're gonna have to figure out a way to put this in so over-committing is another big mistake this is otherwise known as failing to use the word no when necess and this can be a really tough one

especially for those of us who suffer with wanting to be a pleaser I definitely feel when I was younger I I went through that a lot it was really hard for me to say no to people but you know running these kinds of projects just knocked that right out of you immediately because you really have to be comfortable saying no especially when it comes to expectation settings because your number one job as a producer on these kinds of projects is the set your team up to be successful by under promising and over delivering I cannot say that enough so that man see her plan has to be extremely focused on what's practical and not what is ideal too much process now I imagine some of you are seeing that you're squirming in your seats going process don't take away my process how are you talking about because as producers we'd love us some process right this is our leg safe-haven in a world gone mad this is what keeps us sane but sometimes we have to

recognize when process is actually just there to make us feel better as producers versus being a useful tool for the team in the context of a burner project it's really important not to bog the team down with too much project management overhead I don't know about you but my team hates it when I slam them with a lot of project management overhead it drives them crazy because in my experience on any project that I've ever had to step into that has a lot of heavy project management process that's the first thing that goes when things go sideways and so what ends up happening is people spend a lot of time often you or your team trying to get all these micro processes set up and when those go away that's time wasted and more than likely you've really irritated your team in the process so right-sizing process is really critical on a fast turn project that's that's in a death spiral and

basically my rule of thumb there is I try to start out a project with the least amount of process that will be useful as possible and if I need to add it later that's a little easier on my team that cutting process that's not working so failing to stay focus is another one and almost every project like this I feel like you're you're battling this constant fight between the big picture and the small picture so what might be great for the picture the big picture is almost always disastrous for the immediate term so this can present a really it's not necessarily at the end of the world because it can present a really great opportunity to do some expectations setting and if you look at if looking at the big picture does jeopardize your immediate short-term goals then it gives everyone a chance to reevaluate the priorities of the project and last but not least assuming that additional resources will solve your

problems and there's an old production saying it's one of my two favorite sayings next to it is what it is is you can't put nine women in a room and have a baby in a month if you guys heard that that's like my my favorites when you're under the gun it's really really tempting to throw resources at the problem and that's one thing I'll say in the games industry we often do have the opportunity to do that but oftentimes that's not necessarily always the answer to all of your problems in fact one of our first jobs that we did at clutch play it was a consulting gig we worked for a company down here in San Francisco and it was a really crazy project we had to do a minimum viable project or products MVP and we had 12 weeks to do it and it was really tight and very ambitious and so we actually had a very small team it was my team plus some members of the clients team who hired us and we actually were able we had a very

very tight scope and we were actually able to finish the project a day early and the clients were beside themselves they're like my god we didn't even think this was possible at all and you finished a day early this is amazing and so they were so happy that when we went to phase 2 of the project they said you know if you could go this fast with this small number of people imagine how fast you can go with twice that number of people and I completely understand that in but not surprisingly everything got quite a bit slower because you had a bunch of people of differing skill levels they were ramping on the project it was harder to enforce code standards and we still had these same same tight deadlines so it was not quite as smooth as everybody had hoped and so in my experience when you're actually really under the gun to get something done in a really tight timeframe often the best way to do that is to have a really small focused team of experts who can really

come in take care of business work really cleanly and get the job done so let's talk about scope and schedule control a little bit which does go hand-in-hand with communication so in my experience the best way to manage scope control is to establish a framework that holds everybody accountable on the team so everybody it needs to be accountable for their actions and decisions all across the board no matter what role you're in or what level of the company you're in so that's you your team your clients or managers the whole ball of wax so in a rushed really difficult project environment for that to work effectively everyone needs to hold themselves to really high standards and so to do that that involves a lot of transparency transparency and accountability really go hand in hand so it's really important that everybody is aware at all times of what's going well

and what's not going well so the way we often handle that is of course daily stand-ups I'm sure most of you do that I'm a big fan of doing those as long as you can keep them very nice and tight and short so people can go back and do their work but also I'm a really big fan of status reports and that's something I feel like no matter what I can never skip and I'm very much of a big fan of nothing should ever be a surprise so when I mention status reports I sent my slides off to my GDC advisor and she asked a really good question she was like well you know if you're if you're doing status reports how do you get people to read them and I'm currently on a project where I do a daily status report and I know almost nobody reads them except the one person I need to read them so you know that that's that's a different story but I find in weekly status reports one of the things that's been really effective for me in the past when I worked at ei I was a community manager at one point and so it was my job to feed what whatever was wrong in the live environment to

production and this was on The Sims Online and there was a lot of things wrong all the time on that project and some really kind of spectacularly strange ways and so the way I found that I got a really wide readership on that status report is I just filled it with as much Gallo's dark humor as I possibly could and that's how I would know that everybody was reading it as I'd hear like these groans and laughs coming off as soon as I would hit Send and a lot of people would come up to me on a weekly basis and say you know you were always delivering such shitty news and those status reports but at least you know the the having a laugh over it makes the bitter pill go down so that's one way to do it another way I've seen people do it is I have a friend who would often put things in her sash report like the first three people come who come up to my desk you'll get chocolate and so she would know exactly who read her status report by who asked for chocolate and so that's another way you can do it so another thing that's really important to keep

track of and highly visible is is what is not accounted for in planning so you can be the greatest planner in the world but there are going to be things you're going to forget it just happens all the time and there's no shame in that as generally generally recognized that you can't know every single need of the project right from the very beginning so it's really important to call those out and keep track of those in case any trade offs need to be made which of course brings us to trade off tracking on projects with a really really tight scope it is incredibly important that you keep track of what's getting rolled off and what's getting rolled on so at the end of the project you don't have any unhappy surprise with a client or a boss saying well I thought this feature was going to be part of this release and you you know you have to have some kind of his Oracle log that says well actually if you remember we took it out because again games are chaos these kinds of projects are really chaotic oops so it's

really important to keep track of that because people will not remember decisions that are made in the moment another thing that's actually really important to do I think is especially with weekly status reports keeping a running list of action items across all levels of the company I find that keeps me really accountable often if I'm doing a weekly status report and I suddenly will see oh crap I committed to do this last week and I didn't do it so it gives me the opportunity to run around and make sure that all of my commitments are solid but it's also really good in terms of managing up because I often find that sometimes what stalls the project is when somebody in leadership is just super busy and they don't have time to get you what you need which could be a decision it could be a design document and so I find that basically that's a really good way of in a non-confrontational way saying okay we have had this thing it's been out there for a couple weeks now I know you're

really busy but if I can't get this from you in the next you know day or so we're not going to meet our project deadlines and often I've actually found that this is really helpful when you're having these difficult conversations because often leadership is a little more forgiving on you know the consequences of stuff like that if they're the ones who are actually causing the bottleneck so out of scope requests happens on every single project I've never had a project where there was an out of scope requests and again I'm a really big fan of under-promise and over-deliver so on a tight turn when out of scope requests come up without an obvious trade-off on the table I will always try to accommodate it if I can I always keep a running list and when there's time I will throw things in win it all humanly possible that's part of the over-deliver part of it but it's also really important to track those and keep a big long running list and one of my projects

it was a non game project it was kind of one of the best client interactions I had I a woman who I really liked I had given her a lot of extras on her project and I kept this big long running list of here's all the extra things I've given you and then at the end of the project she came to me and said okay I need these five other things and these were things I just I couldn't do it I could not make that concession to her and so as I sitting there you know trying to think how am I gonna how am I gonna very politely tell her no I let out this unconscious sigh and she immediately said okay no I hear you I know you've given me a lot of extra stuff there's this huge long list of things you've given me so I'm gonna give you a change order you'll have ten thousand dollars more tomorrow and I'm like wow that was the easiest conversation I ever had and then it's actually the the list that had the conversation for me so it was it was really good so a couple Prague couple of thoughts on crunch so too often in this

industry crunch is actually used as a crutch a never-ending crutch a painful painful crutch and that's a shame because I do think you know crunching has a very bad reputation and I actually think that crunching can be really useful if it's used in the right way in a surgical way as it were so going back to as I mentioned I talked about my experience on the Sims and one of the ways we were able to go from being the piece of the pipeline that was most behind to the piece that actually got ahead was we did something kind of interesting with crunch so at that time this was back in the EA spouse days as many of you might remember that where there was a lot of mandatory weekend work and so it was very common to say

everybody has to come in and work at least one day on the weekend maybe even two days if people are really behind so my animation director and I actually went to senior management before any of that began and we said look we're really far behind and we need to catch up so here's our proposal we're gonna give the team some notice a month we're gonna crunch for a month and during that time I'm gonna schedule them for six days worth of work and if they can get that done in five which is possible just work a little bit longer every day you they will never have to come in on the weekend and so what I asked of them is okay if they catch up then I want them to I want you to agree to not make them come in and do mandatory weekends that'll never happen so okay we'll agree to that and as it turned out there were some really interesting results in bringing the team into crunch in that way for one thing everybody really appreciated that they got a month's notice so it gave them time to finish up their projects it gave them time to arrange for childcare if they needed to

do that they got to get their Yaya's out and have fun it was a it was the beginning of summer so people got to go and do what they needed to do and they knew that the crunch was coming so another interesting thing that happens so people were actually they were pretty okay with it they weren't as as angry as you often find when you announce that there's gonna be crunch another thing that had accomplished was that it made everybody rapidly efficient because nobody wanted to come in on a weekend ever and so by actually telling people if you can get ahead if you can just be really efficient with your time during the week then you don't have to come in on the weekend that made everybody insanely efficient because people realized if they could get their work done for the week at about 3 o'clock on Friday they could actually start the next week's work and that meant that they were almost certainly guaranteed to not have to work the following weekend so people who got really competitive with each other like hive not worked at all and I'm this far ahead so people were

actually getting quite far ahead of even where we expected them to be the other thing that this actually did to was it enabled me to see who was not using their time well because there were definitely some people the same people were there every weekend the ones who did work were the same people and those are the people that I would actually see horsing around a lot during the day so that was also really useful information so my team and I we do a lot of these kinds of projects and honestly we don't crunch that much and again the reason for that is really careful planning but when we do crunch we try to front-load it as much as we can to use it as a way to get some velocity and get ahead versus it being a stopgap because everything is going sideways really hard so for whatever that's worth I wanted to throw that out there because I think crunch is very useful if used correctly so some final thoughts on expectations setting

just to summarize a few things never assume everyone is on the same page or knows what's due next I got to say in my team I would much rather that they roll their eyes at me and and be super irritated by me repeating exactly what I expect them to do rather than assuming that they know what to do and being horribly disappointed another thing is again over-promised and I'm sorry under-promise and over-deliver know first thing I said would be bad I can't say that enough always always always set your team up to over-deliver when possible again nothing should ever be a surprise big big fan of that and escalate issues early and often sometimes when you're on a crazy project and things go a little sideways it's tempting to want to say this might not turn into something so I'm just gonna sit on this but it's always much easier to just take responsibility if something is a little bit off

raise the flag and say it's a little bit off and we need to keep an eye on it this might turn into something bad so last but not least let's talk a little bit about chaos I'm running low on time here but the thing about chaos is no matter how great a producer you are or how carefully you've planned chances are something is just gonna go sideways it is just gonna happen so it's really important to figure out how to cope when things go sideways [Music] and the first thing to do is recognize that you don't have to be perfect the only person who thinks you have to be perfect often is you all you have to do is be effective so adopting a policy of constant evaluation and adjustment is also really important and I think one of

the best ways to do that is have very very regular personal conversations with your team one on one something beyond the daily stand-ups where you really get a sense of how they're feeling about things what is working for them and what's not working for them so something I think sorry if you are a producer I personally feel like if you if you run these kinds of projects the most important job that you have is to make problems go away that is 95% of what I do all day long so if something is frustrating your team or slowing them down or generally causing annoyance make whatever adjustments you need to make those problems go away and that's actually often what keeps the team really happy and productive so this is this is the answer to to the riddle of how do you eat the elephant one bite at a time of course so I found when you're managing an unmanageable project

one of the things that often happens is that it's not ever one thing that goes wrong it's the one thing that causes a chain reaction of many many things to go wrong so it's rarely like one big problem you're dealing with at a time as often many so when things go sideways they go sideways pretty hard so it's really important when that happens to make sure that you're not trying to run in 20 different directions at once to fix it all at once and sometimes it's really tempting so one of the best things that I've found is to just make sure that you're always prioritizing what the problems are and just taking them down really methodically and doing it in an orderly and methodical way so another one this is actually a big thing to just keep your sanity when things are in a chaos mode is stay clear about what is and what is not within your control fix the things you can control delegate

some of the things that are outside of your control but still controllable and [Music] breathe heavily when there are things that are just utterly outside of your control there are some problems you can solve and some you can't so do what you can with what is what's solvable so again escalating very very important and last but not least leaning on your team is really important in times of chaos it's really a tempting sometimes to feel like when you're on a project that is in a freefall mode that you're carrying the weight of the world on your shoulder and you're doing that by yourself but you don't actually have to do that nor should you because that is actually a big part of being part of a really highly functional team that's what your teams are for so it's really important to make sure that you're prioritizing developing strong relationships with your teams that you're working with you can be the greatest producer in the world you can

know how to code you can know how to do art you can know how to animate but unless you can clone yourself eight million times you are not going to be able to do anything by you're not gonna be able to launch a project by yourself so you are only as good as the team that you have around you and this is never more true when things are going sideways so running these kinds of projects above all involves a really high degree of trust and respect with your team so you should never underestimate the power of loyalty and sheer force of will in making something happen and I've had that many times when I've been in a really difficult situation with a team I've worked with a lot they will often say alright you know I'm really burnt out I'm really over it but I'm gonna do it for you because I know that you have my back all the time so never underestimate that also don't most people to do more than you're willing to do that is a really big deal to a lot of

teams especially when they're in a crazy project or maybe they're crunching and this goes for working late or weekend work if you're asking people to work late kind of have to work late with them if you're asking them to work on the weekend you got to be there with them and there's nothing I have to say that it destroys morale faster than asking people to do stuff that you weren't willing to do in fact a lot of the projects I've inherited that have actually been in a freefall have been the result of people doing that to their team one too many times and the team will say you know what I'm gonna let you fail happens a lot so don't do that and find opportunities to lift up your team I got to say early on in my career when I was an associate I worked with a really amazing executive producer and he really set a great example of what it is to run a team that inspires a lot of loyalty everyone wanted to work with him because

quite frankly he if you were on his team you got promoted if you did something wrong he took the hit for you if you did something right he shined the spotlight on you it was a pretty amazing experience and because of that we were all rabidly loyal to him to this day of that man called me up and said I need you I'd get in my car and I'd Drive nine hours to go to his house because he was pretty amazing so it's really important to look for opportunities to reward a team that's been working really hard for you if there's a kind of project they want to work on then look for that kind of project if they want to have a particular role in the company look for opportunities to give them experience so they can actually get into that position if they know that you have their back they will have your back and last but not least I think I'm gonna just let this one sit here because I don't even know if it requires any explanation but be a champion and not an on

really crazy projects being an buys you exactly nothing so that is pretty much the end of my talk here I am open to some questions all right hey so you talked about succumbing the urge of doing now and planning later so one of the tools that have been very useful especially like you know pre-production early phase is the prototype like building prototypes prove things are working to prove this is what we want to do the problem I've been facing several times is that when a prototype works it's like hey it's working great and we ship it like this is not really a transition between we finished a prototype now let's plan for this and build this right so kind of wondering if you have any advice how how do you identify that prototype is done

and you're actually working on the real team on the real thing and you need to stop and plan that's a good question so the question was how do you know when a prototype is done so basically you have something and it you don't know when to stop is that your question base yeah we kind like say oh the prototype works great we just keep building on the prototype and ship that and and but but then they found the infrastructure is prototype yeah well that's again that kind of goes back to that big big picture versus small picture and a lot of products do actually start like that it's like there's a crappy prototype you know code base and suddenly this has to exist as a functioning product and I think it really depends on what your ultimate goals are if scalability is really really challenging on a on a code base that was not designed to be scalable so if you're asking how do you how do you push back on that or that's like so at some point the prototype is done you say

okay it works we want to build it you need to stop building the prototype and then plan for the actual thing yes but I notice that doesn't always happen you just keep on working with a prototype yeah even though it's shitty and yeah so that is a very good question on some projects that we've worked on we have certainly been in that situation and often what we will try to do in that case is to try and figure out what is salvageable versus what is on sky and start to actually build a project plan around what needs to be retrofitted to make the project more scalable that is an open-ended question so I'll be happy to talk to you about that afterwards Hey hi great talk yeah do it a lot so one of the things that we have up we have problems with this then I'm part of the development team but I'm also the managing because we have a very small team uh-huh it's a studio based in Costa Rica so we I don't really have access to

other producers and stuff so prioritizing becomes a huge issue for me because since I'm already part of the team everything seems important and so what would be your advice in order to try to prioritize better so you are in a position the question is what what is the advice to help prioritize a team that does not have a producer so you do not have the ability to also have a producer at any point we tried using a remote producer but it just it just doesn't do it right I got it so this comes up a lot particularly in the indie community because a lot of indie teams don't have producers in fact last year I was part of the indie soap box rants and and my talk title was make a budget for sake because most Indies don't actually have them because they don't have producers and they get in a lot of hot water and and so often this is a big challenge and I think the best way to do that is there's usually

someone on the team who has a vague interest in being a producer is that normally you it's that is always me always always and do you want to be a producer well I or do I have to I like it but I would prefer to be on the sign coding which is my actual background right well often I've found when when Indies say they can't afford a producer I'm a living example that that is not necessarily true I'm probably the highest billing person on my company when we run multiple projects I actually bill on all those projects I sell in a lot of the work so you might actually find that there is a way that you could afford to have a producer on your team to help you with some of that but failing that I understand that that's a really challenging question because you also have your own set of work that you have

to do so yeah I think the best thing is to carve out a fair you have to carve out time to be a producer I guess that's the best answer I can have is that a production job is not really uh it's not an afterthought it's something that you actually have to devote time to you have to devote thinking time to you have to devote planning time to so I think if you are actually functioning as a producer on your team and you don't have one then you need to actually have specific hours carved out of your week where that is all you focus on that's really the best advice I can really give you thank you sure great talk I'm especially the title loved it so you

had a picture of a fire and someone was looking at and saying everything's gonna be okay yeah you know people like yourself other people too it comes naturally to have that kind of leadership skills to look at a shitty situation say hey you know be that conduit we're gonna be okay we're gonna be okay is there a way to I'd you have any tips in terms of training people to to head toward that path in terms of that skill to be able look at a crazy situation and move forward I know experience is the best teacher and just going through the paces helps but any training tips anything you've seen that helps you you know grow that skill within people yeah that's a great question so the question was how do you get people to want to take on these kinds of projects so I think the people who tend to gravitate towards these kind of projects are people with a lot of really good soft skills because there is a huge amount of people management involved in that so the people who tend to do really well at these kinds of things are people who can soothes a lot of emotional upheaval so

those are the 10 that the kinds of people who often are kind of predisposed to it I think the way that you actually help a producer in my experience when I've been mentoring people is putting them in a position where they are set up to be successful so kind of like I was talking about with my old boss he would actually take the hit if things went bad and he would actually point out when things went well again part of this is getting over that fear so a lot of people don't want to take on these projects because they're really scary there's an opportunity for failure so if you want people to take on these kinds of projects give them a support network so they have someone standing behind them who can actually help them get the project off the ground and then actually reward them when they do well it's really important to reward successes of people who take on projects like this yeah hey hello great dog I think that in

the middle of the cries how do you evaluate if the problem is with the process or is with the people that is a good question so the question was how do you evaluate oh gosh when the project when the problem is with the process versus the people so it's kind of a it's a it's a power-to-weight ratio thing if something is taking an enormous amount of time and overhead of my time and my team's time then there has to be a really demonstrable value in in doing that so I was on a project not too long ago where there was an enormous amount of overhead there was a lot of projects project tasks that were broken down in a very micro fashion and that took a huge amount of work and sometimes it caused more confusion than it helped I understood the reason why that that was

what what was being asked but at the same time it took a lot of time and it actually sort of confuse everybody about what was done versus what was not done because it's really hard to close out a task when it's related to a larger system that's not done so that was a good example of something that that quickly went out the window and that was a good example of something where it took everybody a lot of time to enter all those tasks to break them down in that microwave and it ended up not being worthwhile so it really there's a couple things I think part of it is does the amount of time that I'm actually spending on this project this particular task does it actually bear out good results so that's one way another way is to just talk to the team my team is very much a they don't like a lot of heavy process overhead and so they will be very quick to tell me like

I don't know why you're making me do this what is the value you explain to me what the value is of this and if I can't explain the value to them then I'm like well that's fair we're gonna drop it so just being in dialogue with your team is really helpful I would say thank you thank you Hey hello hi so my one of my questions I guess this is the most important one but uh when I come to start a new project there seems to be this really kind of a production crunch where we're trying to like waterfall out the whole design and then we take an agile approach when we're moving through our sprints but at every project there seems to be like this nebulous in the first few weeks where everyone's like I don't really know what I'm doing not everything's planned and we're like wasting time at the start so we get off to a bad step yeah and then we kind of have to now catch up so how what should I do to try and mitigate that on these projects that I have well I guess so the question is at the beginning of the project there's often a nebulous phase where productivity kind of goes into a black

hole while the product is while their schedule is being can well if it's an any dev project we need to design a lot of the features of the game do a lot of breaking the task down what they're gonna do and that takes you know a week two weeks all the leads need to get together and consistently talk and revamp what we're doing but in that time no one's really doing constructive work towards the goal it's just kind of like oh well I guess I can work on this or I can try and prototype that but it ends up being stuff that other another never gets used or just was a waste of time to do and I want to try and better use that time the beginning of a project rather than let it slow us down and how did that start yeah well usually when we're actually in our planning phase I have every member of my team involved in the planning phase because there's always some element of the project that they need to be involved in so if I'm actually working on like design tasks breakdowns then my engineers are working on

engineering tasks breakdowns there's always something that they can you know I guess I understand your point if you're working on design then there's not a lot that the engineering team can do without design but there is often stuff they can do for core tech so that is often what I have the team do if we're at the beginning of the project and there's dead time I have them focusing their energies as engineers on ok what is the core tech that we know we're going to need ok start thinking about that and breaking down that task time I do find that generally in the beginning of the project there is a little bit of R&D that goes on at the beginning of the project so sometimes there is stuff that just has to be thrown out we're working on a project right now where there's there is some R&D so it will be thrown out it's a really fast term project so we're gonna throw it out really fast if we have to but I think some of that is a little bit unavoidable the planning phase can be a little bit of a deadtime that's not

necessarily the end of the world but if you can get people working on core stuff then that is always a good way to do it or getting them talking to QA or getting them thinking about other other things that are going to be coming down the line that you have to be factoring in later that make sense thank you yeah ok well thanks guys you [Applause]