Well, the sprint failed last week. That didn't surprise me as a whole slew of new people were attempting to get used to the new work flow. During class time, we held our first team retrospective and it went very well. It was strange to be in a larger group dishing out and receiving feedback but it went surprisingly well. There was something said about everyone on the team, which was great. I was particularly proud of my lead artist who had to give out the harshest criticism to one of his new artists who had billed far more hours than their work showed. My lead did it very gracefully and professionally while not beating around the bush either. I feel like that is the model of what I need to do in my interactions with others. Beyond that, there were quite a few tasks that got put off till way too late last sprint. That's something I urged everyone on the team to get right as quickly as possible during the next sprint, so we can move the project out of greenlight. Greenlight, in case you don't know, for my team is essentially solidifying all our features and scope for the final game at the end of the semester. It's the requirement before we can truly go into full production and is due in one more week from now (I'm writing this toward the end of our second sprint).
This second week's sprint has been better than the last but still has some glaring issues that need to be addressed. The largest one is that our game's scope still seems overblown to do in this single semester. I'm not trying to do the bare minimum here, I just don't see us succeeding with what we currently have planned given our time-frame and various production halts during the semester like GDC and PAX. This became very apparent when I put together a preliminary schedule of the semester milestones and saw how few sprints we actually have till we are required to hit a feature complete game.
I met with the other producer on this project and he agreed and raised another, equally valid, issue that our team needs to address - confusion or miss-alignment of the vision or goals. This may be our biggest issue right now with so many new members. It's clear that we aren't all on the same page, and we need to be. I think this was caused by two main factors: having the main on-boarding meeting before a long break (winter break), and the leads not being more involved as a whole in the design process. While the lead designer should make critical design decisions (especially considering she's the acting product owner as well), the lead team must take some of that burden and responsibility on ourselves to ensure the game is top notch and that we all share a unified vision. Without that, we can't hope to build this project without a lot of wasted effort.
Tomorrow morning, I've asked my lead team if they can stay longer during our weekly lead's meeting. I hope to address many of these concerns then, including scoping down the project some and making sure that the design is fleshed out, simple and ready to be executed within a week.
Even though there are all these issues to address, I must say that I find myself relieved a bit. Perhaps it's a bit of selfishness on my part, but I'm happy to have a real task ahead of me and I'm happy that my previous anxiety about this project was founded in something - even if I didn't recognize fully what it was. I think it means that my instincts are growing stronger with this thing called project management. Now I just need to be able to put those feelings into logical arguments so I can relay it to the team in a more efficient manner. For now though, I'll take this next bit one step at a time.
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