Project Management

This table is what I've lovingly dubbed the "Scrummary." This table shows our weeks for the first semester at a full glance, knowing the number of weeks, sprints, any potential deadlines that may be popping up, and weekly updated that show our overall progress of work so we can see what's mainly changed and keep notes for what has and hasn't worked. Additionally once we were able to get our full roadmap planned out we can list what tasks we wanted complete each week to see if we were on schedule. This gave me additional time to reflect on each week as well as allow our team to look back and see what we've done if there's anything we needed to apply or catch up on.

What mattered to me most for my team was accessibility. Documentation is a necessary yet difficult part of game development and I wanted to ensure that those steps were easier to allow developers to focus on game development and being in engine making those important changes. One of my first steps for this change was to conquer the challenge of finding documentation. With so much work all over the place ensuring that it was organized and easily found was a top priority, so I created a flowchart that shows exactly how it's organized so you'd know right where to look. This small portion of effort was loved by the team and helped them find the information they were looking for throughout the semester.

Additionally with other tools being used like Jira and daily check ins to help know everyone's tasks, I used a sprint by sprint template where all the information we needed was on one easy to view page. We all talked through as a team each week looking at the current state of our game, how our work went last week if there's anything we immediately need to revisit, create a retrospective to figure out how we can make each week more productive than the last, and then communicate as a team our tasks. I like having the full team talk in general terms what our major goals are for the week so we can make sure everyone is on the same page, give them time to bring up any important information that may be needed, and make sure everyone knows who is doing what. I've found this helps the team have additional bonding, learn who is working on what if any issues arise, and make general goals stay aligned throughout the whole process.