When I build schedules I go through a series of analysis steps to make sure the schedule has some chance of being realistic. Staring at a huge Gantt chart is useless for this task. Being a somewhat evolved creature, I’ve created some neat tools to help me – and they might help you too.

The first tool I’m going to talk about is the Timeline, available here  – it exports a huge glob of tasks in Project to an easy-to-read “Fisher Price” schedule in Excel. This high level view sheds light on schedule problems, and even gives you enough information to solve them.

I”ll give you cool visual aids in this post, but don’t look at them here - click on the images and look them in a new window in full resolution so you can see what I’m talking about:

Click here for full image…

This is a week to week schedule that shows what a small team might be doing on a typical game project. The text in the colored bars are task categories, each one getting a particular color. The different resource groups such as Art, Tech, Prod, and Test can be autofiltered making it easier to look at even large schedules without the risk of losing your mind. Milestone are easy to spot as vertical red dashed lines, as well as holiday time which is seen in black and yellow.

So, you might say, this is fairly cool, but other than turning my nasty project schedule into a pleasing color chart what can I really DO with this? A few things, actually.

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In 2006 NCSoft asked me to create macros for Microsoft Project that would create an easy to read timeline in an Excel file. Project managers assign categories to each task (something I ask all my clients to do anyway) and use a spiffy dialog box to give each category a color. The exporter creates the timeline in just a few seconds, where a hand built version of this would take hours. Here’s a screenshot:

As NCSoft and I found, the timeline was so incredibly useful that in December 2006 we started negotiations to transfer ownership of the work back to me so I could publish it as a commercial software product. My associate, Quoc Tran, took the lead and reached an agreement with NCSoft in early January, 2008.

Together, Quoc and I will repackage the original NCSoft design, and add some new features as well:

1. It has been rewritten in C# and VB.NET.  
2. Resources can be filtered by Group or Subgroup
3. The timeline can be output in daily, weekly, or monthly formats.
4. The timeline can output vacation and holiday time separate from tasks.
5. The Add-in for Microsoft Project 2003-2007 has a 30 day trial period
6. It is digitally signed with a code signing certificate from Thawte, which will enable the Add-in to be installed and run in high security corporate environments.

The Add-in will be released in February 2008. Look on this web site for a new product page announcing the Timeline Add-in and others already in development.

I’m writing this blog post from my hotel room in Hannover, Germany! I’ll be attending and speaking at Game Focus Germany, a cool intimate conference in Hannover held on January 24th and 25th.

I’m particularly interested in attending Greg Kostikyan’s keynote on Thursday, “The Independent Developer Shall Rise Again.” Looking at the huge internal development machines of the top publishers I can’t help but think we’re about to go through a rather painful reorganization of the whole industry. But, through that we should see some great new companies, new games, and new directions.

I’m also looking forward to the party on Thursday night hosted by Black Lion Studios. I’m sure there will be vast quantities of beer there, and I can only hope any pictures of me will stay off the internet.

At 11am on Friday, I’ll be lecturing on the 3rd person camera technology I wrote for Thief: Deadly Shadows during my stay at Ion Storm. It is a little outside my usual management and production topics, but I always like getting back to my programming roots.

The presentation has almost two dozen movies of bad camera movement, tolerable camera movement, and great camera movement (if I do say so myself). Each section shows what happens to a camera if you don’t handle a particular case of third person camera movement, such as linear movement, fast rotations, and negotiating geometry.

I’m also interested in meeting some independent German developers during my stay. My relationship with the Lyon, France based Arkane Studios is extremely rewarding in both directions, and I’d consider myself very lucky to find a German studio to work with in a similar vein.

Beyond that, I’m already enjoying my stay in Germany – it is a beautiful country and I apologize to every native German speaker what I’m doing to your language!

Programming has been around since the 1950’s  but the discipline is so new there is a constant stream of methodologies that seek to solve various problems relating to programmers and programming. In the last few years these include an abandonment of the classic waterfall methodology to a class of agile methodologies; some of which are pair programming, XP and SCRUM.

The waterfall method starts with a design phase, continues to an implementation phase and from there goes into debugging and then maintenance. It is seen by many in the games industry to be too rigid and unusable for game projects since so many new ideas crop up during the entire life cycle of the project. It is essentially impossible for even the best game developers to design a fun game using only Microsoft Word, so a different development approach was needed.

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Managing good people is easy, and is a real joy. Dealing with trouble brings its own challenges, but getting them solved without resorting to drastic measures can bring its own rewards. I’d like to say I’ve seen it all, but every time I say that something weird happens and I’m taken down a notch. Still, let’s look at a few specific cases of bad programmer behavior and what I did to address it.

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Some who has never been a programmer should know what a programmer does on a minute to minute basis so the odd walk by their workstation can be wordlessly productive rather than intrusive. Just like everyone else, programmers can spend time wisely or waste time – and recognizing either situation will help you keep your programmers on track.

First let’s talk about how programmers spend time at their desk, what you may see on their screen and what it means.

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Programmers, in my opinion, have the greatest responsibility for affecting a project positively or negatively – I’m biased of course, because I used to be a programmer. Programmers are scientists and artists, and have the personalities to match. Some programmers are skilled to the point of being magicians, others not so at all. A study done in the early 1970’s showed a 1:100 ratio between the skill levels of a group of supposedly similar programmers. This should strike fear into any project manager – after all how can you plan a project where what one programmer could do in a day another would take three months?

I’ve been a project manager for fifteen years, and since I started my career as a programmer I’ve picked up a few tricks and tips that will hopefully help you get the most out of your programming team.

To direct the effort of people, specifically programmers, you have to understand a few things about them and their work. You can’t just jump into a pilot’s seat and fly a plane because you’ve “seen it done”, neither can you manage programmers.

First we’re going to discover what motivates programmers – find out how to give them what they want and they’ll usually return the favor.

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I just returned from the IGDA Leadership Forum held in the San Francisco Airport Marriott Hotel on November 8^th and 9^th, 2007. If you didn’t go this year, and you are either in management or want to be in management, you should definitely put this show on your calendar for next year.

There was a live blog for all the sessions – and you can find them here: http://www.igda.org/leadership/

The conference was an intimate gathering of some of the most important developers in our industry. Attending the sessions and listening to discussions over the open bar the things that were foremost in developer’s minds were the usefulness of agile development methodologies, such as SCRUM, fixing the broken developer/publisher relationship, and continuing to improve the quality of life of our staff developers without losing the reason we all do this job: creating fantastic new games.

There’s so much content on the IGDA Leadership blog that I don’t feel the need to repeat it here – but overall I think Jason and the rest of the Leadership group did a fantastic job setting up the conference, getting great keynote speakers, and choosing a facility that was great for the sessions and equally great for networking and socializing.

I’ll definitely attend next year!

The IGDA-Leadership Forum is coming up in a little over a week – it is held at the San Francisco Airport Marriott hotel on November 8-9. I’ll be attending and lecturing – I’ll be participating on a panel on November 8^th at 5:15pm, “Team Motivation and Morale” and also giving a lecture on November 9^th at 2:30pm, “Managing Engineers.” I’m also going with a mission – I’m looking for developers that are ready to take their organization to the next level – whether that means AAA game development, multi-project game development, it’s up to you. There are fewer and fewer independent developers out there with all of the continuing acquisitions – and I’m trying to find the diamonds in the rough. If you think your group is ready – let’s meet and see what you’ve got.

 UPDATE - I’ll also be running a roundtable at 12:15 on November 8th - Strike Team Structures for Large Teams - where we’ll discuss how to create multidiscipinary teams that maximize autonomy and minimize dependancies and communication problems. 

I just found out that my lecture about using MS Project in conjunction with Excel, SQL2Project, and MediaWiki has been accepted for an encore performance for GDC 2008 in San Francisco.

Since GDC 2007 I’ve been working hard on new techniques and tools that make the producer’s job less painful, even enjoyable. In the 2008 lecture, I’ll advance the talk somewhat into planning milestones and visualizing your team’s workflow – something that MS Project just doesn’t do at all. I’ve been working with my clients to develop some great automation for multi-project resource allocation and soft dependencies between projects without the horrible links.

How I’m going to do all this in a 45 minute lecture is beyond me – maybe I should learn to talk faster! In between now and then, please let me know if you or your studio is interested in hearing the latest version of the GDC 2008 lecture, which I’ll be working on more or less constantly until I’m standing at the podium.

I will always give this lecture for free!

Call or contact me if you are interested. I would love to get some feedback on the new ideas and presentation as I work toward my GDC 2008 lecture.