Sprint 20: Team Dynamic and Communication Changes
This week I’d like to take some time to talk about our team’s dynamic and communication these past few sprints. Some mistakes were definitely made on my end as a producer that ended up affecting the teams productivity pretty negatively. It has always been my belief that if you don’t feel comfortable talking to someone about your life then you probably don’t want to work with them either. I realize now that I wasn’t doing a part of my job which is to make people feel safe, comfortable to speak up, and trusted in our work environment. I was too concerned with preparing deliverables and meeting deadlines that I forgot to take care of my team.
Quick Note– if you are interested in the development progress of Lucha Megadrive for this sprint check out some of my team member’s development blogs:
UI/UX Designer, QA Lead, and Cabinet Lead: Natalie
So let’s jump in! First, I need to explain the green light process for our project. A few weeks ago we met with our executive producer on various criteria our project needed to meet by a certain time otherwise there was a possibility that our project could get cut and the time and money we put into the project thus far would mean nothing. Eventually the deadline for this criteria came and went and we didn’t fully meet it. We accomplished everything we needed to do, with a little bit more, but we still hadn’t figured out our art direction. Worst yet, our lead artist was going to be out of town for personal reasons the next sprint.
Mistake #1: I assumed we weren’t going to be able to get in contact with our lead artist for the upcoming sprint and I didn’t try enough to contact them before we made plans as a team.
Mistake #2: I started talking with a different artist on our team to figure out what we could do to come up with an art direction without our lead artist.
As it usually is in the moment, I didn’t think I was doing anything wrong as I was just trying to figure out how we were going to meet our deliverables based on our constraints. I didn’t stop to consider that maybe our “constraint” of our lead artist being out of town wasn’t as extreme as a constraint as I was assuming. I was wrong to make that assumption and not ask how much they could contribute because in the end our lead artist put in a week’s worth of hours during their down time on the trip.
This in addition to the stress from trying to meet the green light criteria lead me down a path where I thought the solution was to switch who our lead artist was temporarily so that we could have something to show for our deadline. This was a mess and there were hurt feelings all around. Several days were committed to apologizing to each other and our team’s dynamic to a huge punch in the gut. It is hard to properly plan things out when we aren’t being open and honest with each other, so we decided that our team needed to commit more time getting to know each other again, spending time outside of the project, and reminding each other that we are all human beings with our own lives.
We spent time with each other doing check ins like: Rose, Bud, Thorne and P.I.E.S.. We also went to an escape room together which was a great activity for us to interact with each other as a team, have fun, and see each other in a different environment other than game development. (For the record we finished our escape room with 13 minutes remaining out of a starting total of 60 and were told that most teams don’t make it through the particular room we did!) We all love working with each other and in order to keep that work honest and productive we each have to commit time and effort to make sure we are doing things right. We can’t just go off on our own based on how we feel– game development is a team effort and we have to talk and work with each other so that we can all succeed together and make something amazing.
