Schedules are a necessary part of game development. From planning team-related work to individual tasks, it's important to keep on top of things and to stay organized. My process is generally to use the team scheduling system as the macro of my tasks so that team members are aware of what I'm working on and its status and to use my personal scheduling system as the micro of the tasks where I can plan the order of how I should complete the task and by when.
Personally, I like to be very active in a team kanban board, updating the backlog and my status on my current tasks. In a current project, my team decided to use a Trello board to organize ourselves. This worked well at the beginning but quickly dissolved when people stopped updating it. As a result, lots of time was wasted on tasks that we no longer needed or that were already done. This slowed down development quite a bit and was very frustrating as someone who was making good use of the tool. We're now re-implementing this system because without it , things get messy and ideas get lost in note documents or discord messages quickly.
For scheduling personal work, I also use a Kanban board to organize myself as well as a calendar. Using the same system as the team schedule is just more convenient and working in one Kanban board serves as a helpful reminder to update the other one.
Did you like this post? Tell us
Leave a comment
Log in with your itch.io account to leave a comment.
Hi Ben!
You're right, Kanban Boards are very important and very useful and also very cool. I hope you have a great life bud!
Sorry to hear that the Trello board fell through. It can be hard without someone dedicated to keeping on top of it, or if team members responsible forget that it exists. It's nice to hear that it's being reimplemented! I hope things get back to smooth sailing.
Hi Ben,
I'm curious to know what steps your team has been taking to motivate members into updating the new task board. If that hasn't been fully discussed, maybe start small by having weekly check-in sessions to see where people are? Or encourage work-in-progress image sharing, so people can directly see how much someone has done (maybe this would add pressure to do work, haha). Regardless, I hope it works out for you guys! Best of luck, you got this.
I think the use of a team kanban board is a great idea (maybe we'll use it for this project) but one thing I've noticed in your post is that even though you found it to be useful if the whole team isn't participating in using it, then the momentum of the project could fall apart (at least temporarily) as a group scheduling tool like that seems heavily reliant on everyone using it. I do worry about things like that happening in future projects because no matter what you do if your whole team isn't contributing to it, it doesn't feel as effective. I guess it is good for finding out who is having trouble with keeping track of things and that in itself is a useful thing to know.