Planning Week

“When you fail to plan, you plan to fail”

-Benjamin Franklin

This week, my team and I made a lot of progress on arguably the most important part of any project: the project plan. Imagining what a project is going to look like on your own is easy, and your proposed solutions always seem like the best choice in your own mind. Merging your personal view with those of other team members can be difficult, especially if two members have mutually exclusive views of how core parts of the project should function.

Luckily for me, this week was a triumph in harmoniously integrating differing visions for me and my team. I think that part of this success was due to each of us having a firm view of our strengths and weaknesses, and a willingness to concede when we knew that another member knew what they were talking about. I provided some views on how our TCG should function as a game, while Stew was knowledgeable about back-end architecture, and Rasheed took the lead in front-end choices.

Of course, you can have a perfect team on paper, but that won’t mean anything if they don’t function well together in practice. It is extremely important that every member of the team is heard from and included in decision making. Rasheed and I are a little more forceful in our communication methods, but I was happy to see that both of us made sure to get input from each other and Stew before decisions were finalized. Making sure that the whole group is included in decision making is going to continue to be important as we move forward.

On the plan itself, I think that we chose well in making some concrete choices that we can act on immediately (such as technology choices and specifications for the front end and database), but we are allowing enough room in the plan for something to inevitably go wrong, or for a better alternative to our current ideas to be put forward without causing a total restructuring of everything. We still have a lot of choices to make about the game itself, but we have plans to make those decisions before they need to be implemented.

The real test of any plan and any team is how it responds to unexpected issues arising. Based on our communication this week, I have high hopes for our response to problems, and I will report what happens when we need to make a change.

Until next week,

Chris