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Hey all, this is Marleigh Norton from the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab.  We're a university research lab that studies and develops video games.  Most of our development is done by undergraduate students, so much so that we hire some students to be "producers," a role with many managerial aspects.  One of my jobs is to mentor the producers.  While in previous years this was mostly done by handing them a team and... well, I'd like to say working with them to improve and giving them lots of feedback, but in practice it was more watching them flail and only stepping in when it was too late.  Surely we can do better.

This year I want to try a bit more formal training and actually hold workshops and roundtables on how to produce a game, with special emphasis on team dynamics and soft skills, since that's the part that seems to come least naturally to our students.  It was while looking for resources to help teach these things that I found Manager Tools.

So far, while I find MT has lots of interesting ideas, I'm not sure how many of them can be usefully adapted to my situation. We hire the students a semester at a time, so our workforce changes every three months.  Most of the methods and models suggested are long-term.  I think I'm going to give one-on-one's a shot anyway and see how it goes.

Cheers!

Mark's picture
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Hope you find what I have - more communication is better.

Mark

jhack's picture

Welcome to the forums, Marleigh.  Indeed, more communication is better - much much better.  

Some thing to consider:   regularly scheduled meetings with the producers to discuss their progress.  Maybe like a one-on-one (see the basics, and the "project manager one on ones").  Let them talk about anything they want, and then ask them specific questions about their initiatives. 

John Hack