A look at managing a large-scale project

[InterfaceLeader]

Write the Game » MMO Development is a guest article that was submitted to my blog on Game Development. There's a few points from it that are applicable to any large scale project that involves several people. Since most productivity sites seem to focus on individual effectiveness, I thought it would be interesting to pull out some of the main points.


- Picking the right people. It's not just about skills, it's about how the team as a whole operates. Get just one person that snarls up the creative process and you'll pay for lost productivity.

- Defining your goals clearly. Whilst an individual working on a project can be quite experimental, and change their mind to see if something else will work better, a team of people all need to be focused on the same end-goal. The original debate that triggered this article showed how widely people can interpret seemingly obvious terms. If your terms refer to genre than you must define them explicitly.

- Being ruthless. If one small, cool but unnecessary feature is holding back completion of the entire project, get rid of it. Before you can polish something you need to have it built.

- The Right Tools - in the case of this article, they chose to build a game engine from scratch instead of use a pre-existing one. Whilst that paid off in some respects, it sucked a vast amount of development time for the game away from them. You do not need to re-invent the wheel.

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How do you go about managing large-scale projects? What are the most important things you've found to keep everybody on the same page?

[cdn2wheeler]

This is a good approximation of how I write for journals, marketing materials and other professional works.

One thing that I'd like to add which is appropriate in my field is the necessary ability to emotionally detach from the outcome (where have we seen that before? ). When working with editors, it's important to remove the sense of ownership from my deathless prose. Key is to be proud of what one does, but not be emotionally attached to it. Granted, that's not something that came easily; it took years, literally, of trying to understand that suggested changes were to improve the finished product and not as a slight against the writing itself.