Behind every great project is a great agenda

During the last few weeks, our team has been engaged in identifying and setting deadlines, milestones, risks and schedules for our project.

Breaking bone... and the process.

One of the first steps our team focused on was working on the Work Breakdown Structure of our entire project. Dividing our final video game into Epics related to each division of labour. And by sequential subdividing each Epic into Stories and Subtasks with all the deliverables necessary for the conclusion of our process.

The idea behind this is to identify our enemies, I mean terminal elements, of our project. With this, we have an excellent base where we can plan our future moves. This entire process was great, not just for the project manager but for the whole team, as it helped a lot to visualize the key elements that will be needed to complete our game.

Why are you smiling so much?

With our project properly dismantled with our WBS, now our team chose to do a risk analysis that each of these deliverables could eventually have.

For that, we did a premortem workshop to imagine what would be the worst consequences that our project could bring, including death. The premortem is a way to overcome our natural optimism – our mind is excited about the new game to be developed and has a tough time visualizing anything going against the plan, given that we put effort into producing what we think is a reasonable and achievable plan. However, the premortem changes that by forcing us to visualize death, I mean, the failure, and create a coherent narrative for it. Therefore, the premortem is usually more effective than traditional brainstorming, but it has the downside that it can feel corny or dramatic.

With this, we were able to identify the risks that may occur in the development of our project. Then our team organized them by Impact and Probability. By multiplying these two factors, we can see which risks are the most relevant for the project, but always paying more attention to the "known unknowns" than to the "unkowns unknows." You know?

You need to make your commitments!

Now that we adequately shattered our project, in a good way, with our WBS diagram and got our risks properly targeted and under observation. Now it's time to assume our responsibilities.

Our team is now working on distributing our stories and subtasks in our calendar. Ensuring that all tasks are appropriately distributed in our Roadmap during the subsequent production steps with their respective Sprints already assigned. Likewise, we also want our Gantt Chart to be organized in the right way so that the hierarchy of tasks has a logical flow, preventing tasks from being blocked by tasks that should have been done before.