Fastlane, I realize you are not trying to flame this project, i have a tendency to seem cold or serious all the time, which can be taken different ways by different people, it's just my way. I wanted to make some comments regarding your last post.


1. True, no comments

2. There arent 27 people, at least not on my list, we have 9 i believe.

3. You'd be surprised how mistaken you are on this point, military project managment can be more brutal than civilian project management, exception is that we don't directly control the budget of a project, but we can affect it. In my office there is constant bickering just between the project managers. It get's really nasty when you start trying to work with the other workcenters in our unit. Let me give you an example, I'm an E3(Airman First Class), one of the lowest ranks in the military, sometimes i'm required to task other people or units to do things for my projects, these people might be E7's(master sergeant), O3's(Captain) even all the way up to O6(Colonel). Usually these people don't like that fact that they are being told what to do by someone extremely junior in grade to them, therefore they rebel and do everything they can to not do what i ask even though they know that they are supposed to because of the aurthority granted by my title. The job requires you to learn how to sweet talk people into thinking they want to do what you want them to, as opposed to telling them they have to do it.

4. I ordered the book, thanks for the recommendation.

5. In my job i'm VERY familiar with this approach as this is how we work ALL of our projects, however i'm not really sure how to apply it to game dev as this is my first time playing the producer role for a game, but i'm sure the book will help explain this, so thanks again for the recommendation.

Anyway, at this point in time i cannot see telling the team "sorry guys, go find another project, this one's not ready for development", nor can i see telling them "sit tight for a couple of months until we get this design document completed". What i can see is getting all team members involved and working as a team to complete the design document and all necessary parts of it. This may require quite a number of online conferences, but it would allow us to weed out those who arent even willing to put forth the effort to talk in a chatroom. Plus it would allow everyone to gain a thororgh understanding of the project prior to developing it. Most importantly, they wouldnt feel like they are working on someone else game because they're putting thier own ideas into it aswell, this is actually the way many large companies do thier design, not necessarilly everyone working the design, but everyone inputs into the brainstorming. Well, i thought i had more to say, but i seem to be drawing a blank now, if i think of anything else i'll let you know.



James