Deep in the Enchanted Forest stands a lovely little cottage; home to Steve White and the Seven Directors. Steve, known as “Snowy” to his pals, is the sole employee of a game development company Enchantia Software. He’s the sole employee because all seven of the other people working there are Company Directors.
The Seven Directors previously worked for the evil Baron of Manchester but two years ago they ran off into the Enchanted Forest and set up their own game development studio, Enchantia Software, where they could make games without being told what to do by the big boss. Steve is pals with one of the Directors and recently joined the company as a game tester. Unfortunately he isn’t getting to do much testing as the game seems to be spending rather a long time in development (far longer than their Publisher was led to believe) and hasn’t even reached Alpha test yet.
Obviously Steve is only a tester so he is not really qualified to judge but it seems that the Directors spend an endless amount of time arguing over various game features and seldom actually come to a decision. Currently the management team is made up of three programmers who are Joint Technical Directors and four artists – one Art Director, one Animation Director, one Creative Director and a Modelling Director. Unfortunately the one Director they don’t seem to have is a Managing Director (because they are all equal and couldn’t actually agree on who should be the MD or if they even needed one). In addition they don’t have a properly defined decision pipeline – a process to ensure that decisions get made in a reasonable time frame. This is because they all want to be able to make decisions, but none of them want anyone else to be able to make a decision they don’t agree with. As a result all the Directors need to be involved in every decision, even if it doesn’t relate to their job and so even when a decision does get made it takes many far more person hours than it should and stops people from doing their actual jobs.
Poor management structure means slow or non-existent decision making which will damage your company and your game. There are several possible causes:
1. Trust – put simply partners don’t trust each other enough to let someone (other than themselves) be “in charge”. Instead of focusing on the importance of making decisions they focus on keeping control. You don’t get the best out of an artist or programmer by standing over them and telling them how you would do their job. The same applies to management. You need to let someone do their job, trust them that they will make the best decision they can then have regular but focused meetings to update each other on status and, if necessary, discuss how and why a decision was made.
2. Your management team is missing the necessary skills – there is no one with an obvious management ability and the whole management team know this. In a case like this it is perfectly acceptable to hire someone to be a manager so that everyone else can focus on what they are good at.
3. The founders don’t understand the difference between management and ownership. Management is a job just like artist or programmer. A good managers job is to enable the team to get their work done – to decide what is really needed to achieve the companies aims and what they can do without. Ownership is just that. You own a share of the company in return for the investment you put in when the company started and the risk you took. For that you (hopefully) get a financial reward in the future if the company is successful and is sold to a publisher. Just because you own the company that doesn’t mean you need to be a Manager/Director. In fact your shares may be worth a lot more in the future if you let someone else do the managing while you get on with what you are good at/enjoy.
Image used in this post courtesy of Kelly Hamilton at junglestudio.com
