Slamming the Big Red Button
Our producer J has been on the warpath. We have no first playable, nothing even close. There was disgruntlement regarding his tone of voice, but nobody denied that his message was sound.
Team members are too shy, even after months of developing the game together, and still not keen on either talking to each other. To combat this, we wrote a task list on the whiteboard -- it worked surprisingly well to make the monumental seem surmountable. People approached the whiteboard, wrote notes on it and pointed at it whilst discussing things. Having a whiteboard list we were able to make marks on also helped highlight work inter-dependancies. Awareness that some tasks cannot be done until other's work has been completed AND implemented showed team members the absolute necessity of being in touch with each other about their progress.
A surprising amount of leadership is just tapping people on the shoulder and getting them to talk to one another.
At the end of the project session, still no first playable that includes ALL the features, but leaps and bounds ahead of where we were that same morning, which feels like a relief.
Learnings: Small changes to team working practices can make a big difference. Try making the Kanban an actual physical Kanban! Try out different tools to solve problems!
[the image of our whiteboard task list is in fact from week 9 of development, not this week, but the point stands]
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