The IGDA Leadership Forum Was...

Very, very cool.  Maybe I'm biased because I was involved, but I thought it was absolutely great.  Our celebrity speakers were incredibly approachable, hanging out in the hallways and even seeing some of the talks.  The small size made for familiarity and friendliness.  Many old friends showed up. (I was afraid I wouldn't know anybody, since we only had 300 attendees out of however many thousands of game developers out there - what were the chances some of them would be people I knew?)  And I finally got to meet Tim Schafer.  And there was a big pile of info in the talks;  some key takeaways for me:
- both Clinton Keith and Trent Oster, when breaking down the silos and starting cross-functional scrum teams, encountered plenty of resistance.  Trent powered through, but Clinton said their animators never accepted scrum and they are treated as a pool of resource at High Moon.  Clinton's a fan of team-building activities:  paintball, mountain biking, and "rescuing your boss." (And I don't think I'm giving anything away here - these talks were being taped live.)   I've been trying and failing to get cross-functional teams working ever since Spider-Man 1 and it's good to hear I'm not the only one with problems.  (Even lately, on Schizoid, we have one guy in one discipline who doesn't want to talk to another guy in another discipline without piping it through the producer [that would be Bill] first...but other than that one exception we're a happy little cross-functional distributed family.)
- Also from Trent's talk:  mix the tools guys into the scrum teams.  The guy making the tool, the guy using the tool, and the guy getting the results of the tool into the game are all in the same room.  This will result in really good tools, as the tools guy watches in horror as someone tries to use his tool.
- Also, a QA guy in every scrum team.
- Sprints are synchronized, with each scrum team's review/planning session coming two days after the previous one, so the project owner can attend them all.
- Some example scrum teams at Bioware:  streaming;  combat;  conversation;  cutscenes;  level design/writing.  Level design/writing splits as the project goes along.
- Bioware (and I think High Moon) still have the lead artist, lead programmer, lead designer positions - they run less frequent programmer / designer / art scrums, and have time to do actual implementation, as the feature team scrum masters are the ones that are heavily tasked with management.
- I'll admit it - I got a little misty-eyed in Don Daglow's talk - apparently a girl formed a bond with her grandfather playing one of his games that wouldn't have been there otherwise.  (I played some Spite & Malice with my grandfather before he died but playing competitively just isn't the same as playing together...meaningful co-op ftw!)
- I get uncomfortable when people talk "leadership" - I know what a manager is, but sometimes you'll hear someone (typically a management consultant) say, "You should be a leader, not just a manager."  And I wonder what that means.  I look in the mirror and I don't see George Patton or Steve Jobs...well, I only saw a few of the leadership-track talks, but my takeaway was that I may not be a George Patton or Steve Jobs, but I am doing the stuff a leader is supposed to do (praise more than criticize, listen, define a general outcome without micromanaging [heck, who has time to micromanage?], and be honest).
- On the praise-more-than-criticize thing, a ratio of at least 5:1 is recommended (sorry, can't remember if it was Farnsworth's or Gerritsen's talk that said that.)  I think I'm in that zone but maybe I should start counting...
- Greg & Ray did not have an exit strategy for Bioware.  They just wanted to make great games.  That will inspire me as I hit the 100th TRC bug and I ask myself, "Why am I doing this again?"

Comments

[Nat]

Awesome. I didn't make this. At just 3.4 years experience, somehow I feel I'm not ready to make the leadership jump (BS?) but I've been following along the leadership blog and what ever write ups and power point slides have been showing up. I know I really need to get my complement:criticize ratio up. It's probably around 1:1 =P So I have a ways to go. Next year...

[Jare]

Don't sweat the leadership bit. If people are following you, then you are a leader, period. "Good" or "bad" is much more subjective ("good for whom?" for example). There's natural leaders, simply because they do things that people want to be part of. Others become "professional" (for lack of better word) leaders because they know/learn how to get people to follow them. Finally, there's appointed leaders, followed because a chain of command dictates so.

Each of the three aspects has its good and bad sides, but all three are necessary to some degree. Natural, to provide passion; professional, to increase effectiveness; appointed, to bring accountability.

[Daisy]

I believe the 5:1 ratio idea was actually brought up by Greg and Ray during their keynote (as part of their description of Transformational Leadership, a business school term). At least that's what my notes tell me! Really enjoyed your session by the way, Jamie, and was quite taken with your theory of "drag."