“What makes the best teams so effective?”
“We began with the 5-factor team effectiveness model described in the book Leading Teams: Setting the Stage for Great Performances”
“We also incorporated the 5-factor team effectiveness model from the famous management book The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable and the 12-factor model from 12: The Elements of Great Managing, which is derived from aggregate Gallup data from 10 million employee and manager interviews.”
“Lacking any objective way to define “success,” we decided to quantify the outcome through the lenses of four different kinds of outcomes.”
“the game’s financial return on investment”
“was the project ever delayed from its original release date”
“level of critical success”
“did the game meet its internal goals?”
“To varying extents, all three of the team effectiveness models (Hackman’s “Leading Teams” model, Lencioni’s “Five Dysfunctions” model, and the Gallup “12” model) proved to correlate strongly with game project outcomes.”
“We see remarkably little correlation between game genre and outcome.”
“We found no statistically significant results for any of these platforms, nor for the total number of platforms a game targeted.”
“experienced teams are significantly more likely to succeed.”
“only individual incentives showed statistical significance.”
“All the other forms of incentives – those based on team performance, based on royalties, based on reviews and/or MetaCritic ratings, and any miscellaneous “other” incentives – show p-values that indicate that there was no meaningful correlation with project outcomes”
“Incentives are usually offered under the assumption that they are a huge motivator for a team. However, our results indicate that only individual incentives seem to have the desired effect, and even then, to a much smaller degree than expected.”
“individually tailored incentives, such as Pay For Performance (PFP) plans, seem to achieve meaningful results where royalties, team incentives, and other forms of financial incentives do not.”
“we truly can’t infer any relationship between production methodology and game outcome.”
“Production methodologies are generally intended to be universally useful, and our results show no meaningful correlations between the methodology and the game genre, team size, experience level, or any other factors.”
“It seems that in spite of all the attention paid to the subject, the particular type of production methodology a team uses is not terribly important, and it is not a significant driver of outcomes. Even the much-maligned “Waterfall” approach can apparently be made to work well.”
“We have seen that four factors – total project duration, team experience level, financial incentives based on individual performance, and re-use of an existing game engine from a similar game – have clear correlations with game project outcomes.”
“Our study found several surprises, including a complete lack of any correlations between factors that one would assume should have a large impact, such as team size, game genre, target platforms, the production methodology the team used, or any additional financial incentives the team was offered beyond individual performance compensation.”