DawnBringer3D Tips & Tricks, Personal News, Game Development

Eternal Management Problem : Communication

Communication problem between the team core and team management is something that almost every team faces at some point. There are loads of reasons why this could happen, to name a few :

• Core team doesn’t trust the management.
• Management is somehow ‘freezed’ or doesn’t care.
• Core team doesn’t have anyone to raise the problems -> remember that management doesn’t have some kind of magical crystall ball to see what is really going on.

How to solve it isn’t easy and it requires time and patience. To solve it you’ll have to start looking up the problems, what kind of communication problems do you have, where do those come from?

During the process it is very important to not blame individuals, it is very easy to do that. Yes, I need to admit that I have done it and will probably do, but I always try to remember that this is a team problem. In rare cases individual person is really causing all the problems.

I remember one indie team where I was working and we had similar problems. We spent loads and loads of time to think about how to solve it. We found out that by taking an outsider to look at our problems helped us to understand the real problems -> it is hard to solve anything if you don’t even know what the problem is.

Anyway, that is my experience and it probably doesn’t apply to other cases as each of them are unique.

If your team is facing these kind of problems, start raising the problems before it is too late. That is the only way to solve things : face the facts. In most of the cases it will reveal other problems too and the thruth will hurt, but it can save your team so it is worth of it.

Some helpful things that I have learned :

• Individual honesty
  • There is nothing worse than lying to yourself!
• Talking the thruth
  • Don’t say “Everything is OK” if manager asks how are you doing and you know that things aren’t OK.
• Taking ownership
  • Start raising the problems and solve them.
• Team instead of individuals
  • Try to remember to not blame individuals!