Here are excerpts from a speech giving at the 2004 Game Developers Conference...
Building Big Licensed Games with Big Teams
Don L. Daglow
President, Stormfront Studios
6. What Are the Key Things to Know About Managing Big Teams on Licensed Properties?
• The licensor is doing his job when he watches every approval carefully. Help the people involved do their jobs well and you’ll have a better game. Teach that attitude to every team member, not just the senior managers.
• Small teams work on personal chemistry. Big teams do the same thing, but there are so many different “persons” in that personal chemistry that something else emerges. You can call it Big Team Chemistry. More often it’s referred to as “team culture.”
On a 6-person team each person has 5 relationships, so 6 x 5 = 30 and you have 30 test tubes of personal chemistry to deal with. That’s a small enough number to work in ways we intuitively understand.
On a 35-person team that number of relationships jumps to about 1,200. That’s enough people and relationships to make the way that issues ripple through the team seem random and chaotic. Daglow’s Law of Team Dynamics: “Small Teams are Informed, Big Teams Infer.”
• Culture emerges by default. It doesn’t matter what you say, but it matters a great deal what you do. Give speeches about quality and then ship buggy games and your team will ignore quality and ship buggy games.
• The bigger the team, the easier it is to be fooled into thinking that key issues are solved when they’re not. With technology changing rapidly, “we’ll do it just like last time” seldom works, and on big teams it’s easier to assume someone else will take care of a problem when in reality no one else has noticed something’s wrong.
.....
Example: If two weeks of the schedule are diverted for an E3 demo (no, I haven’t been reading your email…), one of the following things has to happen:
• The budget has to be increased so more people can come onto the project (a solution that won’t always help), or…
• The total number/quality of features in the game will turn out to be less than would otherwise have been the case (since neither schedule nor budget change), or…
• Regardless of what the schedule says, the project will be late and thus cost more (since neither the features nor the official budget change).
Building Big Licensed Games with Big Teams
Don L. Daglow
President, Stormfront Studios
6. What Are the Key Things to Know About Managing Big Teams on Licensed Properties?
• The licensor is doing his job when he watches every approval carefully. Help the people involved do their jobs well and you’ll have a better game. Teach that attitude to every team member, not just the senior managers.
• Small teams work on personal chemistry. Big teams do the same thing, but there are so many different “persons” in that personal chemistry that something else emerges. You can call it Big Team Chemistry. More often it’s referred to as “team culture.”
On a 6-person team each person has 5 relationships, so 6 x 5 = 30 and you have 30 test tubes of personal chemistry to deal with. That’s a small enough number to work in ways we intuitively understand.
On a 35-person team that number of relationships jumps to about 1,200. That’s enough people and relationships to make the way that issues ripple through the team seem random and chaotic. Daglow’s Law of Team Dynamics: “Small Teams are Informed, Big Teams Infer.”
• Culture emerges by default. It doesn’t matter what you say, but it matters a great deal what you do. Give speeches about quality and then ship buggy games and your team will ignore quality and ship buggy games.
• The bigger the team, the easier it is to be fooled into thinking that key issues are solved when they’re not. With technology changing rapidly, “we’ll do it just like last time” seldom works, and on big teams it’s easier to assume someone else will take care of a problem when in reality no one else has noticed something’s wrong.
.....
Example: If two weeks of the schedule are diverted for an E3 demo (no, I haven’t been reading your email…), one of the following things has to happen:
• The budget has to be increased so more people can come onto the project (a solution that won’t always help), or…
• The total number/quality of features in the game will turn out to be less than would otherwise have been the case (since neither schedule nor budget change), or…
• Regardless of what the schedule says, the project will be late and thus cost more (since neither the features nor the official budget change).
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