Steve Stopps
Steve Stopps, Project Director at Blitz Games Studios in Leamington Spa, gave us a presentation on the importance of project management to the creative industries. The sector is expected to employ 1.3 million people by 2013, more than the financial sector, and will contribute £85 billion to the UK, up from £57 billion in 2009.
A quarter of those employed in the UK games industry are located in the West Midlands. Steve said it’s a multi-billion dollar industry, which strongly performs even during the recession. A huge amount of skills and disciplines contribute towards the end product and it’s important that these are properly managed.
With the possibilities offered by digital technologies there is a real opportunity for the screen and sound based sector to capitalise on the growth in demand for its products, but it has to get serious about managing content production.
Giving a brief overview of Blitz Games Studios’ history, Steve explained that Blitz was started by twins Andrew and Philip Oliver when they were youngsters programming from their bedrooms. The first games produced being the ‘Dizzy’ series for which they still retain 50% ownership. Current titles include the Karaoke Revolution Presents American Idol franchise. Blitz is now one of the largest independent developers in the UK employing over 200 people and the Olivers still share a passion for games. While it might have cost £5K originally to create a game over a few weeks from home, budgets now extend to $20M and can take up to two years to develop.
A Wii Game will typically take 18 months to develop and involve a mixture of skills from a team of 20 to 30 people. Xbox 360 and PS3 games have much larger teams, and can costs tens of millions of dollars to produce. A modern AAA calibre game can have a team of over 400 people working across many diverse disciplines.
With teams that cover a number of skills and disciplines in this way, it’s important to encourage an environment where people are free to do what they do best. Steve explained that, for him, this philosophy is what defines Project Management.
• A project is a predefined achievement that is set within scope, time and cost constraints.
• Project management is the discipline of organising and managing resources in such a way that these resources deliver all the work required to complete a project within defined scope, time and cost constraints.” (Wikipedia).
• A Project Manager rarely takes part in the activities that produce the end result, but rather strives to reduce the overall risk of failure.
Project Management is best illustrated by the ‘Quality Triangle’ below, if there is any change in Scope, Time or Cost - then Quality is affected.
The same principles apply to the creation of other media content such as Film where the production and post production schedule is key to a successful outcome. Managing Risk is common to all types of creative production, allowing for the identification of sources of potential risk so that these can be addressed and eliminated before they impact on any given project.
Enabling teams to produce their best work is coloured by the laws of production management, or rather the avoidance of some of the bad laws that exist. Steve described the different approaches identified in Maslow’s X and Y Theory, namely that X denotes an authoritarian style of management where tight control is exercised by telling staff what to do compared with the Y approach, which gives responsibility and ownership to staff. With the latter, teams are trusted to develop and are able to earn respect; they are onside with the scope of a project and can work to a common goal.
Steve went on to talk about Change Management and how vital it is to have control over projects that inevitably change the longer they last. The tips are:
• allow changes that will produce the best possible product
• educate all relevant parties of the cost and impacts of the change
• notify all peripheral parties of each proposed change, its impact and if it was accepted or rejected
• keep an audit trail of all change proposals
Scheduling is also key, based on the size of projects and the effort required.
Contingency has to be allowed for too, given that an eight hour day is rarely devoted entirely to project completion – it might be more like a five hour day once time for emails, meetings and training are deducted.
The pros of contingency:
• better retention of key personnel
• increased organisational agility
• an improved ability to invest in the future
• a capacity for sensible risk-taking instead of risk avoidance
The major con of contingency
• it adds a lot of additional cost to the project! Steve identified some classic project management mistakes:
• insufficient planning
• planning to catch up later
• project heroics
• adding people to a late project
• omitting necessary tasks from estimates
• overly-optimistic schedule
• inadequate design
• feature creep
• unrealistic expectations
• bad communication
Another useful strategy, given that many projects never end or run in phases of ongoing development, is to monitor successes and failures with regular post mortems.
These can often be overlooked. A library of post mortems can provide an excellent repository of mistakes – to be avoided in future. The exercise of putting together a post mortem is an excellent exercise in project review i.e. what went wrong and what went right.
Steve then invited questions from our audience, many of whom had been taking copious notes throughout his presentation. He recommended ‘The Project Management Body of Knowledge’ (PMBOK) for further reading.
We were delighted that Steve had taken the time to come and talk to us and our thanks must also go to Blitz Games Studios. It was a fascinating insight into the processes of project management and there were lessons for us all to learn, most importantly we were reminded that we need to get it right when clients risk what are sometimes huge amounts of money with us. |
