I wanna hold your hand!
I got a chance this week to have have coffee with the executive producer at IO Interactive, the guys who make Hitman. He showed me around their studio, and it was great.
Geoff, my old boss at Sony, used to talk about how much he liked talking with other producers and touring their studios. I now understand why. On the one hand, it has a way of showing you your own mistakes, and on the other hand, it confirms that certain problems in game management, and project management in general, are universal. For example, one of the things that always left me scratching my head was what I called the 'hold-your-hand' phenomenon. It went something like this. I'd arrive most days at about 9am. Around 9:30, I'd do my rounds with team and just sort of see how things were going. Inevitably, I'd encounter at least one person who was either waiting on something to be finished by another person on the team or waiting for somebody to respond to an e-mail with information that only they had. My first questions was always, "Have you spoken to Person X?" The answer was almost always, "No."
"Do you have a couple of minutes right now?" I would ask.
"Sure."
"Okay, let's go talk him." I would then basically hold the hand of the person as he walked over to Person X's desk and asked him the question that had been holding up the works, often for days. Usually, the answer would take five minutes and everything was good. But on really fun days, it would turn out that Person X was also waiting on a similar response from somebody else, and I would spend the day creating a daisy-chain from desk to desk, basically a highly paid form of external initiative, getting people to do what it seemed like they should have been able to do for themselves.
It used to bother me, as it seemed like a poor return on Sony's investment in me to have me walking around the studio saying, "Have you talked to X? No? Let's go talk to him." Even worse, people were often unable to leave their desks, so I would often end up shuttling small pieces of information back and forth across the studio. I found this particularly funny, as I was just about the least technically-savvy person in the studio, and hence, often the worst person to be explaining what somebody else said about "complicated technical issue number 3449." I suppose I'm just enough of a futurist to think that there should have been some easier, high-tech solution for this problem than having a meat-based messenger carrying information from one point to the next at about 2 mph, especially when the information usually degraded so badly as it clunked along through my synapses. I likened it to have a styrofoam cup that I would fill up with information at one desk and hurry over to another desk to deliver it, only the cup had several large holes in the bottom. By the time I got where I was going, all that was left of my steaming hot cup'o'information was the residue.
Among other things I learned while touring IO Interactive, it seems that this is a common problem for producers, and I was assured that no matter how good your communication network is, at some point, face-to-face conversations are necessary. "Did you get that thing done?" "No." "Okay, I need it by this afternoon." So I can lay that complaint to rest. The hold-your-hand phenomenon is part of human nature.
Geoff, my old boss at Sony, used to talk about how much he liked talking with other producers and touring their studios. I now understand why. On the one hand, it has a way of showing you your own mistakes, and on the other hand, it confirms that certain problems in game management, and project management in general, are universal. For example, one of the things that always left me scratching my head was what I called the 'hold-your-hand' phenomenon. It went something like this. I'd arrive most days at about 9am. Around 9:30, I'd do my rounds with team and just sort of see how things were going. Inevitably, I'd encounter at least one person who was either waiting on something to be finished by another person on the team or waiting for somebody to respond to an e-mail with information that only they had. My first questions was always, "Have you spoken to Person X?" The answer was almost always, "No."
"Do you have a couple of minutes right now?" I would ask.
"Sure."
"Okay, let's go talk him." I would then basically hold the hand of the person as he walked over to Person X's desk and asked him the question that had been holding up the works, often for days. Usually, the answer would take five minutes and everything was good. But on really fun days, it would turn out that Person X was also waiting on a similar response from somebody else, and I would spend the day creating a daisy-chain from desk to desk, basically a highly paid form of external initiative, getting people to do what it seemed like they should have been able to do for themselves.
It used to bother me, as it seemed like a poor return on Sony's investment in me to have me walking around the studio saying, "Have you talked to X? No? Let's go talk to him." Even worse, people were often unable to leave their desks, so I would often end up shuttling small pieces of information back and forth across the studio. I found this particularly funny, as I was just about the least technically-savvy person in the studio, and hence, often the worst person to be explaining what somebody else said about "complicated technical issue number 3449." I suppose I'm just enough of a futurist to think that there should have been some easier, high-tech solution for this problem than having a meat-based messenger carrying information from one point to the next at about 2 mph, especially when the information usually degraded so badly as it clunked along through my synapses. I likened it to have a styrofoam cup that I would fill up with information at one desk and hurry over to another desk to deliver it, only the cup had several large holes in the bottom. By the time I got where I was going, all that was left of my steaming hot cup'o'information was the residue.
Among other things I learned while touring IO Interactive, it seems that this is a common problem for producers, and I was assured that no matter how good your communication network is, at some point, face-to-face conversations are necessary. "Did you get that thing done?" "No." "Okay, I need it by this afternoon." So I can lay that complaint to rest. The hold-your-hand phenomenon is part of human nature.
posted by L&D at
11:19 PM
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