Management Conundrums

I was cleaning out files on my computer and came across this old article I wrote.  Maybe I've already posted it, but a Google search for "conundrums site:gamedevblog.com" didn't come up with anything.

Anyhow, here's the article:

It seems that every project management platitude out there has its converse out there as well.  To wit:

On Offices

"People Should Have Their Own Offices" – Steve McConnell

The argument being knowledge workers need long periods of undistracted time in order to accomplish thought-intensive tasks.

"People Should All Be In One Big War-Room" - http://216.239.57.100/search?q=cache:nlRWO_hsyFUC:daffy.doc.stu.mmu.ac.uk/bsc/subhanis/+war+room+software+engineering+study&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

The argument being that communication is essential and therefore everyone should be able to always talk to everyone else.

On Scheduling

"Optimistic Schedules Are Bad" – Steve McConnell

The argument being that to achieve an overly optimistic schedule you engage in risky and shoddy workmanship, creating a massive bug list that ends up lengthening your schedule beyond what it originally would have been before you got "aggressive."

"Optimistic Schedules Are Good" – Steve Maguire, Jim McCarthy

Steve's argument being that tasks take the amount of time allotted for them;  to make sure they take as little as possible, create an impossible schedule and rest secure in the knowledge that everyone is getting everything done "as soon as possible."

Jim's argument, from Software For Your Head, is that there are no shortages of resources;  only shortages of resourcefulness.  I guess we could paraphrase him by saying necessity is the mother of invention.

And In Conclusion That Is What I Have Said

I'm sure there are more examples of these.  In these cases, I think there are solutions where a kind of synergy between both arguments can be developed:  for the offices question, we could have a central war room ringed with private offices;  "your" computer is in the war-room, but when you need privacy, you can borrow one of the private offices.  (I've never heard of anyone actually trying this.)  An amusing side note is that on most teams (including the ones I've worked on) we do the exact wrong thing:  the people who are actually doing the work are in cubicle farms or share offices, where they get maximum distraction and very little communication, whereas the leads – who should be doing most of the communicating and less actual work – get their own private offices.

And with scheduling, you can use the method from Critical Chain and Slack:  schedule deliverables aggressively but have a fat safety buffer at the end of the project.  In a way, the industry already does this and calls it 'alpha', although we supposedly do it as a time to fix bugs (which encourages sloppiness, IMO.)

Comments

[Factory]

On Scheduling:
Hmm methinks that schedules should be generous enough so that developers never have to cut corners, but one also needs to make sure that developers stay on focus, and not go off on flights of fancy. Easier said than done.

[Pag]

What this shows is that serious studies need to be done on these subjects and the results need to be actually listened to.

I know there was studies on the effect of noise and privacy on productivity (read Peopleware for details) showing that having quiet work conditions help a lot (you don't need one office per worker, just put 3-4 people who need to work as a team in the same room). I've never read about actual studies proving the opposite, only about people reasonning about why cutting cost by not giving private offices should improve productivity. Reality trumps theory every time, so I tend to believe more the private office camp (if anybody has counter studies, I'd be happy to read them and eventually change my mind).

That's a big problem with the gaming industy in my experience: very few people actually know of the studies that have been made on important subjects, and of those who do know fewer actually believe them. A lot of people seem to believe that gaming is somehow different from every other industry, that it's so different that all those studies are automatically invalid even with no counter study available. If we're to improve our methods of working, we need to start looking at things the way they are and not at the imaginations we have of them.

[greggman]

I've seen private offices ruin a team. I believe in Joel's 5 worlds (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/FiveWorlds.html) Most programming books are written for corporate programmers writing custom apps or backend solutions. Those books are often not applicable to games. In a game generally 2/3rd of the team are artists and designers, not true for corporate programming. In games, at least console games, there is no support phase or future to the code unlike corporate programming. For a game, constant interaction with those artists and designers is more important than the benefits of private offices in my experience. In other words, they are different endeavors in different environments so they need different guidelines.

I agree with your assessment, if anything the leads should be out in the open possibly even more than the rest of the team.