“Every game is a reflection of the team that made it, and the best way to raise your game is to raise your team.”
“First, we looked at the management of design risk. It’s well-known in the industry that design thrashing is a major cost of cost and schedule overruns.”
“the best teams carefully manage the risks around game design, both by working to mitigate the repercussions of design changes in development, and by reducing the need for disruptive design changes in the first place (by having a better design to begin with).”
“changes to the design during development, and the way those design changes were handled, made enormous differences in the outcomes of many of the development efforts we surveyed.”
“when they did occur, participation of all stakeholders in the decision to make changes, and clear communication and justification of those changes and the reasons for them, clearly mitigated the damage.”
“design documents are far less useful than generally realized. The only area where they show a truly meaningful correlation is with project timeliness. This seems to suggest that while design documents may make a positive contribution to the schedule, anyone who believes that they will contribute much to product success from a critical or ROI standpoint by themselves is quite mistaken.”
“successful teams have a strong shared vision, care deeply about the product vision, and are careful to resolve disagreements about the game’s design quickly and professionally.”
“passion for the project makes for a more satisfied team and a game that gets better review scores, it has little to do with hitting schedules.”
“Even in the area where you might expect crunch would improve things – project delays – crunch still showed a significant negative correlation, indicating that it did not actually save projects from delays.
This suggests that not only does crunch not produce better outcomes, but it may actually make games worse where it is used.”
“teams with stable membership are far more effective than teams whose membership changes frequently, or those whose members must be shared with other teams.”
“questions around project turnover and reorganization showed strong and unequivocal correlations with inferior project outcomes.”
“turnover and reorganizations are both generally harmful, and wise leaders should do everything in their power to minimize them.”
“regular feedback from project leads and managers (our third question in this category) is key”
“Easy access to senior leadership (the second question) is also clearly quite important.”
“More successful game projects are much more likely encourage creative risk-taking and open discussion of failure, and ensure that team members feel comfortable and supported when taking creative risks.”
“Employees who receive more respect exhibit massive improvements in engagement, retention, satisfaction, focus, and many other factors.”
“treating deadlines as matters of life and death not only fails to make a positive contribution to the schedule, it is actually counterproductive in the long run.”
“We speculate that successful teams balance their goals for each milestone against the realities of production, the need for team cohesion, and the pragmatism to sometimes sacrifice or adjust individual milestone goals for the good of the overall project.”
“accurate estimation (question #2) and a reasonable level of accountability (question #6) both contribute positively to all outcome factors.”
“training in production methodologies, efforts to improve them, and involving the entire team in prioritizing the work for each milestone are all significantly correlated (>0.2) with positive project outcomes.”
“we found no statistically significant differences between waterfall, agile, and agile using Scrum.”
“We saw no statistically significant correlations regarding outsourcing, and as far as our data set can tell, this has no identifiable impact on project outcomes.”
“We also observed no correlations for cross-functional or per-discipline teams, leading us to conclude that there is probably no “right” answer here.”
“Design risk management showed the strongest correlations, with a correlation over 0.57.”
“Team focus came in a close second, at 0.50.”
“Avoidance of crunch was in third place, at 0.44.”
“After that, team stability, communication, organizational perceptions of failure, respect, project planning, and technology risk management were also very important, all with correlations between 0.36 and 0.39.”
“Production methodologies and collaboration/helpfulness came in last but were still significant, at 0.29 and 0.20, respectively.”
“Outsourcing and the use of cross-functional teams showed no statistical significance. These do not seem to impact project outcomes in any general sense as far as our survey was able to detect.”