Question: Anyone who has been involved with designing
Anyone who has been involved with designing and constructing video games will tell you that game development never goes as planned. I sometimes think that it is a miracle that any game gets developed. Technical glitches, bottlenecks in production, conflicting creative egos, pressure from publishers, they will all throw you off course during the development cycle. It is a process that occupies the area on the borderline between art and technology. Yet, although video game development is an uncertain and complex process, it is how the development process is managed that is the key feature in whether a game will go on to be a success.’ (Izzy McNally, Co-Owner Widescale Studios was a videogame development studio, located in the midlands of the UK. It had been founded seven years ago by Izzy McNally and Oli Chambers, when they left a larger studio to gain ‘some creative independence’. Video game software development studios are the organizations that actually create the games. There are many thousands of such studios worldwide, some large, but most employing less than 30 people.13 Some studios are owned by video game publishers, of which some also produce gaming hardware, and some, like Widescale, are independent. Publishers market and sell the games, manage relationships with distributors, platform providers and retailers, conduct market research and advertise games.
Originally from California, Izzy was, by background, an artist and writer. Oli started as a programmer, but had moved into becoming an executive producer. (In the industry, an executive producer is the person who is responsible for the overall coordination of the development.) Both Izzy and Oli admitted that their desire for more creative independence had not fully materialized: ‘Since we started, we have been surviving as an independent studio by taking on contracts from the bigger studios, and we have built a good reputation. But if we don’t have another contract ready to go when the last one finishes; we are in trouble. It can be dispiriting constantly looking for work to keep us aƃoat. That was why (ierybryde was so exciting.’ (Oli Chambers)
The Ferrybridge project
Ferrybridge was an idea for a role-playing game (RPG) that had come out of a number of brainstorming sessions between Izzy, Oli and Hussein Malik in the middle of an unusually warm and pleasant summer. Hussein was a developer and self-confessed ‘fanatical gamer’ who had joined Widescale soon after it was founded. A role-playing game is a video game in which players assume the roles of characters who are protagonists in a fictional setting. The senior team at Widescale were excited at the conceptof Ferrybridge, and saw it as an opportunity to develop a game of their own that would (potentially) give them both creative and financial independence. The Ferrybridge concept was intriguing, although not totally novel. The game’s
setting was a combination of space exploration and ‘wild west’ adventure (Ferrybridge was the name of the spaceship in the story) with various characters who possessed different skills and psychological traits. The purpose of the game was to build an intergalactic trading empire while avoiding interference from political and commercial rivals.
Traditionally, independent studios who wanted to develop a game such as Ferrybridge had four methods of raising funds. First, they could pitch the idea to a publisher. Most video game development was funded by big publishers. However, publishers almost always insisted on terms that were more favorable to them than the developers. Second, the studio could seek private investors who would put their own money into the company and share any subsequent profits. The downside to this for Izzy and Oli would be a certain loss of independence. Third, the studio could attempt to raise money by crowdfunding, asking for (relatively small) donations from thousands of potential future users of the game in return for preferential access to the finished game. It was an increasingly popular method of raising funding, but limited to relatively small sums in total, often less than £1 million (the typical budget for an RPG would be tens of millions of pounds or more). Finally, the studio could start the development from their own saved capital, then fund the ongoing costs from the profits from their other work. This was the approach chosen by Widescale, who had a retained cash pot of around £700,000. If successful, Ferrybridge could provide a stable stream of income, without substantial rights and royalties going tosome big publisher. In turn, this would let the studio pursue more interesting projects in the future. Table 3.2 shows Wide scale’s projected cash how forecast as of the start of
the project.
The development processes
Video game development is an uncertain and complex process, but a key feature in whether a game will go on to be a success is the way the development process is managed from concept through to launch. Although different studios use slightly different terms, game development is
broken down into three stages: pre-production, production and post-production. Pre-production is the stage where the developers have to answer some fundamental questions about the game, including the market it is aimed at, the platform it will play on, the type of game it is going to be, the budget, the basic storyline and the timescale (at least nominally). The production phase is usually the most
![Anyone who has been involved with designing and constructing video games will tell you that game development never goes as planned. I sometimes think that it is a miracle that any game gets developed. Technical glitches, bottlenecks in production, conflicting creative egos, pressure from publishers, they will all throw you off course during the development cycle. It is a process that occupies the area on the borderline between art and technology. Yet, although video game development is an uncertain and complex process, it is how the development process is managed that is the key feature in whether a game will go on to be a success.’ (Izzy McNally, Co-Owner Widescale Studios was a videogame development studio, located in the midlands of the UK. It had been founded seven years ago by Izzy McNally and Oli Chambers, when they left a larger studio to gain ‘some creative independence’. Video game software development studios are the organizations that actually create the games. There are many thousands of such studios worldwide, some large, but most employing less than 30 people.13 Some studios are owned by video game publishers, of which some also produce gaming hardware, and some, like Widescale, are independent. Publishers market and sell the games, manage relationships with distributors, platform providers and retailers, conduct market research and advertise games.
Originally from California, Izzy was, by background, an artist and writer. Oli started as a programmer, but had moved into becoming an executive producer. (In the industry, an executive producer is the person who is responsible for the overall coordination of the development.) Both Izzy and Oli admitted that their desire for more creative independence had not fully materialized: ‘Since we started, we have been surviving as an independent studio by taking on contracts from the bigger studios, and we have built a good reputation. But if we don’t have another contract ready to go when the last one finishes; we are in trouble. It can be dispiriting constantly looking for work to keep us aƃoat. That was why (ierybryde was so exciting.’ (Oli Chambers)
The Ferrybridge project
Ferrybridge was an idea for a role-playing game (RPG) that had come out of a number of brainstorming sessions between Izzy, Oli and Hussein Malik in the middle of an unusually warm and pleasant summer. Hussein was a developer and self-confessed ‘fanatical gamer’ who had joined Widescale soon after it was founded. A role-playing game is a video game in which players assume the roles of characters who are protagonists in a fictional setting. The senior team at Widescale were excited at the conceptof Ferrybridge, and saw it as an opportunity to develop a game of their own that would (potentially) give them both creative and financial independence. The Ferrybridge concept was intriguing, although not totally novel. The game’s
setting was a combination of space exploration and ‘wild west’ adventure (Ferrybridge was the name of the spaceship in the story) with various characters who possessed different skills and psychological traits. The purpose of the game was to build an intergalactic trading empire while avoiding interference from political and commercial rivals.
Traditionally, independent studios who wanted to develop a game such as Ferrybridge had four methods of raising funds. First, they could pitch the idea to a publisher. Most video game development was funded by big publishers. However, publishers almost always insisted on terms that were more favorable to them than the developers. Second, the studio could seek private investors who would put their own money into the company and share any subsequent profits. The downside to this for Izzy and Oli would be a certain loss of independence. Third, the studio could attempt to raise money by crowdfunding, asking for (relatively small) donations from thousands of potential future users of the game in return for preferential access to the finished game. It was an increasingly popular method of raising funding, but limited to relatively small sums in total, often less than £1 million (the typical budget for an RPG would be tens of millions of pounds or more). Finally, the studio could start the development from their own saved capital, then fund the ongoing costs from the profits from their other work. This was the approach chosen by Widescale, who had a retained cash pot of around £700,000. If successful, Ferrybridge could provide a stable stream of income, without substantial rights and royalties going tosome big publisher. In turn, this would let the studio pursue more interesting projects in the future. Table 3.2 shows Wide scale’s projected cash how forecast as of the start of
the project.
The development processes
Video game development is an uncertain and complex process, but a key feature in whether a game will go on to be a success is the way the development process is managed from concept through to launch. Although different studios use slightly different terms, game development is
broken down into three stages: pre-production, production and post-production. Pre-production is the stage where the developers have to answer some fundamental questions about the game, including the market it is aimed at, the platform it will play on, the type of game it is going to be, the budget, the basic storyline and the timescale (at least nominally). The production phase is usually the most
resource-intensive phase, and is often the phase that is the most uncertain and difficult to plan. It involves programmers, character artists, graphic designers, audio designers, voice actors, quality testers and producers who, in the words of Oli, ‘provide the glue that makes it all happen’. The aim of all of them is to make a game that will be original, fun and involving. They do this by using new gameplays, gripping underlying stories, enhanced graphics and convincing characters. If a game fails to meet users’ concepts of ‘quality play’, they could readily switch to other games. Post-production manages the transition of the game into the market. Often a publisher will become involved at this stage, if they weren’t before. Even at this stage, quality assurance continues because bugs in the software always continue to emerge. A ‘hype’ video extract from the game with a mix of graphics and sample gameplay will probably be released for
marketing purposes, and a spot at one of the major gaming conventions may be arranged.
Starting the Ferrybridge developmentWork started on the outline of the Ferrybridge concept over the summer, with Izzy drafting an outline script and Oli working on some technical issues such as the number of ‘levels’ the game should have and how many maps it should contain. The project was formalized with its own budget in September, when Hussein was asked to put together plans for how the development would progress. His first decision was to hire Ross Avery, who had been his boss at his previous studio. Ross had wide experience in the game development industry, largely in senior executive developer and producer roles.
Ross and Hussein formed the core of the Ferrybridge team and were joined by planners and developers, both newly recruited and moved from Wide scale’s other work. However, Oli recognized that Ferrybridge should not put any of the studio’s regular projects at risk. ‘They are our “bread and butter”, each has a deadline and a budget that we must stick to. (aerobridge has more edibility because it’s directly under our control. Of course, we had a budget for it, but there was still considerable edibility. 5o we looked at the budget and asked the question, do we want a team of 10 people working for 10 months or a team of 20 people working for five months! Theoretically, one could even have had a team of two people working for 50 months, but that would have been ridiculous. Also, at different times inthe development process one will need different numbers of developers with specific skills. The balance was always between allocating the appropriate resources to Ferrybridge without interfering with our other work.’
By November it had become clear that Izzy would have to decide whether to take on responsibility for developing the games script herself or to hire-in a script writer. In the
end she hired a part-time script writer who had experience of television work. Izzy admitted that it was a mistake: ‘Script writing for a video game is totally different from writing for television or writing a novel. I underestimated this. In a script for television the narrative moves in a linear
direction. With a video game the narrative is more like a tree. Each player can move along different branches of the tree depending on the decisions that they make. A script
writer has to make up dialogue for many different scenarios, knowing that each individual player will see only one of them. It wasn’t the fault of the writer we hired, it was my fault in underestimating the differences. In the end I had to take over far more of the script writing than I had intended.’
The scripting and storyboarding of the game continued into the new year, but by January tensions had begun to emerge between Oli, who was concerned about the rate that the project was burning though the budget, and Ross, who wanted the script,characterizations and overall architecture of the game settled before the production phase commenced. Oli wanted to get the production stage of development started as soon as possible. ‘Wide scale’s strength was in the actual production stage of development. That’s what we spend most of our time doing. If we
weren’t good at keeping to schedule, we couldn’t have survived as a contract developer. Also, I thought that we had an outline script and the overall structure of the game more or less sorted from mine and Izzy’s work over the summer. I do understand that when a new person like 4oss first Loins the team, the temptation is to try to sit down at the beginning of the development process and settle the whole script from start to finish. $ut it has to develop naturally; developing the script for a game is essentially an iterative process’.
The production phases
Although there were still uncertainties, and some disagreement around the game’s storyline, by the end of January Olihad decided to formally move on to the production phase and allocated developers and artists to the project. He also started briefing the freelance graphics designers, sound designers and voice artists that they would need later in the process. In early February Ross resigned. He was philosophical about it: ‘It’s not unusual in this business. There will always be some tension between whoever is in charge of operationalizing a concept and the studio owner. The important thing is who holds the budget! In this case the owners [Oli and Izzy] didn’t want to give up control. It’s their company and their money, so I guess they have the
last word on any decisions, big or small. But, personally, I like to have more control than they wanted to give me.’From that point Oli acted as executive producer for the project, with Hussein overseeing technical issues and Izzy ‘creative’ ones. However, during the spring, the development fell increasingly behind schedule. Hussein admitted that many of the problems were the result of their own decisions. ‘We started using a new 3D graphics package two months into the initial development. It allowed a new rendering approach that looked particularly exciting. It made the graphics better than we thought possible. It did give us some spectacular effects, but also gave us two problems.
First, we totally underestimated the learning curve necessary to master the package. It took our developers a month or two to get used to the package and this delayed things more than we envisaged. Second, it became clear relatively quickly that the effect of the change was to knock
the game’s ‘frame rate’ down to the point where it looked poor. We knew the choice would affect frame rate but we just didn’t anticipate the impact this would have on what the game felt like to play. Both these things undermined our ability to estimate how long some key stages of the
development might take. Without the ability to estimate the individual development tasks it became particularly difficult to schedule the development as a whole.’
By June, the development team were overcoming the
problems with the new graphics package, when a further problem emerged. Hussein and Oli had decided to use a previously untried (by Widescale) game engine. (A game
engine provides the software framework that allows developers to create video games.) Many commercial game engines are available to help game developers. Using one means that developers can focus solely on the logic of the game rather than getting bogged down in detail. A game engine allows code reuse, which usually means shorter development time and reduced cost. But not when a development team needs to learn it for the first time Once again, progress slowed. Izzy believed that the problems were the result of trying to balance the eventual quality of the game with the costs of developing it. ‘There is always something of a tradeoff between the efficiency of the development process and the quality of the game that comes out of the process. Just to make things more complicated, you have to wait until the game is almost fully developed before you can judge quality, in terms of how much fun it is to play. So, you have to manage the development process in the best way you think will promote both creativity and efficiency. Both Izzy and Ollie liked the idea of giving as much freedom as possible to individual developers within the team. Compared to many studios the atmosphere was relaxed. On the whole it was thought that this had led to a good creativity that would eventually show through in the final game. Oli also thought that a more relaxed attitude helped to develop and retain the best development talent. ’Developers value legibility to innovate and more ownership over the content they are working on, and some degree of independence from micromanagement. All too easily they can find another studio where they feel their skills are more
valued.’
However, there were times when it proved less than fully efficient. For example, at one time two developers each designed their own different versions of the same scene because their work had not been coordinated, costing several days of wasted effort. There were also problems in managing the studio’s regular contract work alongside the Ferrybridge project. At times the studio’s other work took development resource away from the project. As one frustrated developer put it: ’It could be frustrating to suddenly have a colleague taken off the project for a week to work on another job, but hey, it was the revenue from this other work that was funding the project so naturally it took priority. Nevertheless, there were times when the other jobs were vacuuming up resources, and the whole development process was like being in a pressure cooker.’
Project crunch and financial crunch
By November it was becoming obvious that Ferrybridge was in trouble. It had fallen well behind schedule and the studio’s cash projections were looking bad. The studio’s cash statement and projection at this time is shown in Table 3.3. It indicated that the company would need to draw further on its overdraft facilities in the current quarter and would need more substantial funding in the new year. It was clear that even if all went well and they had no further problems, thesoonest they could launch would be half-way through the following year. Even achieving this would probably involve what game developers call ‘crunch’: working
extended hours of overtime (paid and unpaid) for periods of time in order to hit a particular deadline.Oli was despondent: ‘The real frustration is that the game is looking good. Everybody who has worked on it loves the storyline and are wowed by the graphics. We just need a final effort. It’s tempting to see crunch’ as a failure of planning. But honestly I’ve never worked on a development that has not involved some degree of crunch.’ It was Izzy who finally made the decision in the November. ‘We have been working on this project for 18 months. That’s not long for a game of this complexity. And it’s really good, everyone agrees. Put the potential of a game and the financial viability of its development process are different things. Basically, we have run out of credit and we have to accept that we need help. The most likely source of helpis going to be a publisher. They could fund the remainder of this development from their small change. OK, they will demand a part of the company, and we would lose much of our independence. But it’s either that, or abandon the development, let go probably a third of our staff, and try to get an emergency loan from our bank.’
Questions
1. Was it a mistake for Wide scale to embark on the fiery bride development?
2. List the reasons that could have contributed to the fiery bride development falling behind schedule.
3. What would you have done differently?
4. What would you advise Izzy and Oil to do now, and why?](../images/anyone-who-has-been-involved-with-designing-and-constructing-video-games-will-255549-1.jpg)
resource-intensive phase, and is often the phase that is the most uncertain and difficult to plan. It involves programmers, character artists, graphic designers, audio designers, voice actors, quality testers and producers who, in the words of Oli, ‘provide the glue that makes it all happen’. The aim of all of them is to make a game that will be original, fun and involving. They do this by using new gameplays, gripping underlying stories, enhanced graphics and convincing characters. If a game fails to meet users’ concepts of ‘quality play’, they could readily switch to other games. Post-production manages the transition of the game into the market. Often a publisher will become involved at this stage, if they weren’t before. Even at this stage, quality assurance continues because bugs in the software always continue to emerge. A ‘hype’ video extract from the game with a mix of graphics and sample gameplay will probably be released for
marketing purposes, and a spot at one of the major gaming conventions may be arranged.
Starting the Ferrybridge developmentWork started on the outline of the Ferrybridge concept over the summer, with Izzy drafting an outline script and Oli working on some technical issues such as the number of ‘levels’ the game should have and how many maps it should contain. The project was formalized with its own budget in September, when Hussein was asked to put together plans for how the development would progress. His first decision was to hire Ross Avery, who had been his boss at his previous studio. Ross had wide experience in the game development industry, largely in senior executive developer and producer roles.
Ross and Hussein formed the core of the Ferrybridge team and were joined by planners and developers, both newly recruited and moved from Wide scale’s other work. However, Oli recognized that Ferrybridge should not put any of the studio’s regular projects at risk. ‘They are our “bread and butterâ€, each has a deadline and a budget that we must stick to. (aerobridge has more edibility because it’s directly under our control. Of course, we had a budget for it, but there was still considerable edibility. 5o we looked at the budget and asked the question, do we want a team of 10 people working for 10 months or a team of 20 people working for five months! Theoretically, one could even have had a team of two people working for 50 months, but that would have been ridiculous. Also, at different times inthe development process one will need different numbers of developers with specific skills. The balance was always between allocating the appropriate resources to Ferrybridge without interfering with our other work.’
By November it had become clear that Izzy would have to decide whether to take on responsibility for developing the games script herself or to hire-in a script writer. In the
end she hired a part-time script writer who had experience of television work. Izzy admitted that it was a mistake: ‘Script writing for a video game is totally different from writing for television or writing a novel. I underestimated this. In a script for television the narrative moves in a linear
direction. With a video game the narrative is more like a tree. Each player can move along different branches of the tree depending on the decisions that they make. A script
writer has to make up dialogue for many different scenarios, knowing that each individual player will see only one of them. It wasn’t the fault of the writer we hired, it was my fault in underestimating the differences. In the end I had to take over far more of the script writing than I had intended.’
The scripting and storyboarding of the game continued into the new year, but by January tensions had begun to emerge between Oli, who was concerned about the rate that the project was burning though the budget, and Ross, who wanted the script,characterizations and overall architecture of the game settled before the production phase commenced. Oli wanted to get the production stage of development started as soon as possible. ‘Wide scale’s strength was in the actual production stage of development. That’s what we spend most of our time doing. If we
weren’t good at keeping to schedule, we couldn’t have survived as a contract developer. Also, I thought that we had an outline script and the overall structure of the game more or less sorted from mine and Izzy’s work over the summer. I do understand that when a new person like 4oss first Loins the team, the temptation is to try to sit down at the beginning of the development process and settle the whole script from start to finish. $ut it has to develop naturally; developing the script for a game is essentially an iterative process’.
The production phases
Although there were still uncertainties, and some disagreement around the game’s storyline, by the end of January Olihad decided to formally move on to the production phase and allocated developers and artists to the project. He also started briefing the freelance graphics designers, sound designers and voice artists that they would need later in the process. In early February Ross resigned. He was philosophical about it: ‘It’s not unusual in this business. There will always be some tension between whoever is in charge of operationalizing a concept and the studio owner. The important thing is who holds the budget! In this case the owners [Oli and Izzy] didn’t want to give up control. It’s their company and their money, so I guess they have the
last word on any decisions, big or small. But, personally, I like to have more control than they wanted to give me.’From that point Oli acted as executive producer for the project, with Hussein overseeing technical issues and Izzy ‘creative’ ones. However, during the spring, the development fell increasingly behind schedule. Hussein admitted that many of the problems were the result of their own decisions. ‘We started using a new 3D graphics package two months into the initial development. It allowed a new rendering approach that looked particularly exciting. It made the graphics better than we thought possible. It did give us some spectacular effects, but also gave us two problems.
First, we totally underestimated the learning curve necessary to master the package. It took our developers a month or two to get used to the package and this delayed things more than we envisaged. Second, it became clear relatively quickly that the effect of the change was to knock
the game’s ‘frame rate’ down to the point where it looked poor. We knew the choice would affect frame rate but we just didn’t anticipate the impact this would have on what the game felt like to play. Both these things undermined our ability to estimate how long some key stages of the
development might take. Without the ability to estimate the individual development tasks it became particularly difficult to schedule the development as a whole.’
By June, the development team were overcoming the
problems with the new graphics package, when a further problem emerged. Hussein and Oli had decided to use a previously untried (by Widescale) game engine. (A game
engine provides the software framework that allows developers to create video games.) Many commercial game engines are available to help game developers. Using one means that developers can focus solely on the logic of the game rather than getting bogged down in detail. A game engine allows code reuse, which usually means shorter development time and reduced cost. But not when a development team needs to learn it for the first time Once again, progress slowed. Izzy believed that the problems were the result of trying to balance the eventual quality of the game with the costs of developing it. ‘There is always something of a tradeoff between the efficiency of the development process and the quality of the game that comes out of the process. Just to make things more complicated, you have to wait until the game is almost fully developed before you can judge quality, in terms of how much fun it is to play. So, you have to manage the development process in the best way you think will promote both creativity and efficiency. Both Izzy and Ollie liked the idea of giving as much freedom as possible to individual developers within the team. Compared to many studios the atmosphere was relaxed. On the whole it was thought that this had led to a good creativity that would eventually show through in the final game. Oli also thought that a more relaxed attitude helped to develop and retain the best development talent. ’Developers value legibility to innovate and more ownership over the content they are working on, and some degree of independence from micromanagement. All too easily they can find another studio where they feel their skills are more
valued.’
However, there were times when it proved less than fully efficient. For example, at one time two developers each designed their own different versions of the same scene because their work had not been coordinated, costing several days of wasted effort. There were also problems in managing the studio’s regular contract work alongside the Ferrybridge project. At times the studio’s other work took development resource away from the project. As one frustrated developer put it: ’It could be frustrating to suddenly have a colleague taken off the project for a week to work on another job, but hey, it was the revenue from this other work that was funding the project so naturally it took priority. Nevertheless, there were times when the other jobs were vacuuming up resources, and the whole development process was like being in a pressure cooker.’
Project crunch and financial crunch
By November it was becoming obvious that Ferrybridge was in trouble. It had fallen well behind schedule and the studio’s cash projections were looking bad. The studio’s cash statement and projection at this time is shown in Table 3.3. It indicated that the company would need to draw further on its overdraft facilities in the current quarter and would need more substantial funding in the new year. It was clear that even if all went well and they had no further problems, thesoonest they could launch would be half-way through the following year. Even achieving this would probably involve what game developers call ‘crunch’: working
![Anyone who has been involved with designing and constructing video games will tell you that game development never goes as planned. I sometimes think that it is a miracle that any game gets developed. Technical glitches, bottlenecks in production, conflicting creative egos, pressure from publishers, they will all throw you off course during the development cycle. It is a process that occupies the area on the borderline between art and technology. Yet, although video game development is an uncertain and complex process, it is how the development process is managed that is the key feature in whether a game will go on to be a success.’ (Izzy McNally, Co-Owner Widescale Studios was a videogame development studio, located in the midlands of the UK. It had been founded seven years ago by Izzy McNally and Oli Chambers, when they left a larger studio to gain ‘some creative independence’. Video game software development studios are the organizations that actually create the games. There are many thousands of such studios worldwide, some large, but most employing less than 30 people.13 Some studios are owned by video game publishers, of which some also produce gaming hardware, and some, like Widescale, are independent. Publishers market and sell the games, manage relationships with distributors, platform providers and retailers, conduct market research and advertise games.
Originally from California, Izzy was, by background, an artist and writer. Oli started as a programmer, but had moved into becoming an executive producer. (In the industry, an executive producer is the person who is responsible for the overall coordination of the development.) Both Izzy and Oli admitted that their desire for more creative independence had not fully materialized: ‘Since we started, we have been surviving as an independent studio by taking on contracts from the bigger studios, and we have built a good reputation. But if we don’t have another contract ready to go when the last one finishes; we are in trouble. It can be dispiriting constantly looking for work to keep us aƃoat. That was why (ierybryde was so exciting.’ (Oli Chambers)
The Ferrybridge project
Ferrybridge was an idea for a role-playing game (RPG) that had come out of a number of brainstorming sessions between Izzy, Oli and Hussein Malik in the middle of an unusually warm and pleasant summer. Hussein was a developer and self-confessed ‘fanatical gamer’ who had joined Widescale soon after it was founded. A role-playing game is a video game in which players assume the roles of characters who are protagonists in a fictional setting. The senior team at Widescale were excited at the conceptof Ferrybridge, and saw it as an opportunity to develop a game of their own that would (potentially) give them both creative and financial independence. The Ferrybridge concept was intriguing, although not totally novel. The game’s
setting was a combination of space exploration and ‘wild west’ adventure (Ferrybridge was the name of the spaceship in the story) with various characters who possessed different skills and psychological traits. The purpose of the game was to build an intergalactic trading empire while avoiding interference from political and commercial rivals.
Traditionally, independent studios who wanted to develop a game such as Ferrybridge had four methods of raising funds. First, they could pitch the idea to a publisher. Most video game development was funded by big publishers. However, publishers almost always insisted on terms that were more favorable to them than the developers. Second, the studio could seek private investors who would put their own money into the company and share any subsequent profits. The downside to this for Izzy and Oli would be a certain loss of independence. Third, the studio could attempt to raise money by crowdfunding, asking for (relatively small) donations from thousands of potential future users of the game in return for preferential access to the finished game. It was an increasingly popular method of raising funding, but limited to relatively small sums in total, often less than £1 million (the typical budget for an RPG would be tens of millions of pounds or more). Finally, the studio could start the development from their own saved capital, then fund the ongoing costs from the profits from their other work. This was the approach chosen by Widescale, who had a retained cash pot of around £700,000. If successful, Ferrybridge could provide a stable stream of income, without substantial rights and royalties going tosome big publisher. In turn, this would let the studio pursue more interesting projects in the future. Table 3.2 shows Wide scale’s projected cash how forecast as of the start of
the project.
The development processes
Video game development is an uncertain and complex process, but a key feature in whether a game will go on to be a success is the way the development process is managed from concept through to launch. Although different studios use slightly different terms, game development is
broken down into three stages: pre-production, production and post-production. Pre-production is the stage where the developers have to answer some fundamental questions about the game, including the market it is aimed at, the platform it will play on, the type of game it is going to be, the budget, the basic storyline and the timescale (at least nominally). The production phase is usually the most
resource-intensive phase, and is often the phase that is the most uncertain and difficult to plan. It involves programmers, character artists, graphic designers, audio designers, voice actors, quality testers and producers who, in the words of Oli, ‘provide the glue that makes it all happen’. The aim of all of them is to make a game that will be original, fun and involving. They do this by using new gameplays, gripping underlying stories, enhanced graphics and convincing characters. If a game fails to meet users’ concepts of ‘quality play’, they could readily switch to other games. Post-production manages the transition of the game into the market. Often a publisher will become involved at this stage, if they weren’t before. Even at this stage, quality assurance continues because bugs in the software always continue to emerge. A ‘hype’ video extract from the game with a mix of graphics and sample gameplay will probably be released for
marketing purposes, and a spot at one of the major gaming conventions may be arranged.
Starting the Ferrybridge developmentWork started on the outline of the Ferrybridge concept over the summer, with Izzy drafting an outline script and Oli working on some technical issues such as the number of ‘levels’ the game should have and how many maps it should contain. The project was formalized with its own budget in September, when Hussein was asked to put together plans for how the development would progress. His first decision was to hire Ross Avery, who had been his boss at his previous studio. Ross had wide experience in the game development industry, largely in senior executive developer and producer roles.
Ross and Hussein formed the core of the Ferrybridge team and were joined by planners and developers, both newly recruited and moved from Wide scale’s other work. However, Oli recognized that Ferrybridge should not put any of the studio’s regular projects at risk. ‘They are our “bread and butter”, each has a deadline and a budget that we must stick to. (aerobridge has more edibility because it’s directly under our control. Of course, we had a budget for it, but there was still considerable edibility. 5o we looked at the budget and asked the question, do we want a team of 10 people working for 10 months or a team of 20 people working for five months! Theoretically, one could even have had a team of two people working for 50 months, but that would have been ridiculous. Also, at different times inthe development process one will need different numbers of developers with specific skills. The balance was always between allocating the appropriate resources to Ferrybridge without interfering with our other work.’
By November it had become clear that Izzy would have to decide whether to take on responsibility for developing the games script herself or to hire-in a script writer. In the
end she hired a part-time script writer who had experience of television work. Izzy admitted that it was a mistake: ‘Script writing for a video game is totally different from writing for television or writing a novel. I underestimated this. In a script for television the narrative moves in a linear
direction. With a video game the narrative is more like a tree. Each player can move along different branches of the tree depending on the decisions that they make. A script
writer has to make up dialogue for many different scenarios, knowing that each individual player will see only one of them. It wasn’t the fault of the writer we hired, it was my fault in underestimating the differences. In the end I had to take over far more of the script writing than I had intended.’
The scripting and storyboarding of the game continued into the new year, but by January tensions had begun to emerge between Oli, who was concerned about the rate that the project was burning though the budget, and Ross, who wanted the script,characterizations and overall architecture of the game settled before the production phase commenced. Oli wanted to get the production stage of development started as soon as possible. ‘Wide scale’s strength was in the actual production stage of development. That’s what we spend most of our time doing. If we
weren’t good at keeping to schedule, we couldn’t have survived as a contract developer. Also, I thought that we had an outline script and the overall structure of the game more or less sorted from mine and Izzy’s work over the summer. I do understand that when a new person like 4oss first Loins the team, the temptation is to try to sit down at the beginning of the development process and settle the whole script from start to finish. $ut it has to develop naturally; developing the script for a game is essentially an iterative process’.
The production phases
Although there were still uncertainties, and some disagreement around the game’s storyline, by the end of January Olihad decided to formally move on to the production phase and allocated developers and artists to the project. He also started briefing the freelance graphics designers, sound designers and voice artists that they would need later in the process. In early February Ross resigned. He was philosophical about it: ‘It’s not unusual in this business. There will always be some tension between whoever is in charge of operationalizing a concept and the studio owner. The important thing is who holds the budget! In this case the owners [Oli and Izzy] didn’t want to give up control. It’s their company and their money, so I guess they have the
last word on any decisions, big or small. But, personally, I like to have more control than they wanted to give me.’From that point Oli acted as executive producer for the project, with Hussein overseeing technical issues and Izzy ‘creative’ ones. However, during the spring, the development fell increasingly behind schedule. Hussein admitted that many of the problems were the result of their own decisions. ‘We started using a new 3D graphics package two months into the initial development. It allowed a new rendering approach that looked particularly exciting. It made the graphics better than we thought possible. It did give us some spectacular effects, but also gave us two problems.
First, we totally underestimated the learning curve necessary to master the package. It took our developers a month or two to get used to the package and this delayed things more than we envisaged. Second, it became clear relatively quickly that the effect of the change was to knock
the game’s ‘frame rate’ down to the point where it looked poor. We knew the choice would affect frame rate but we just didn’t anticipate the impact this would have on what the game felt like to play. Both these things undermined our ability to estimate how long some key stages of the
development might take. Without the ability to estimate the individual development tasks it became particularly difficult to schedule the development as a whole.’
By June, the development team were overcoming the
problems with the new graphics package, when a further problem emerged. Hussein and Oli had decided to use a previously untried (by Widescale) game engine. (A game
engine provides the software framework that allows developers to create video games.) Many commercial game engines are available to help game developers. Using one means that developers can focus solely on the logic of the game rather than getting bogged down in detail. A game engine allows code reuse, which usually means shorter development time and reduced cost. But not when a development team needs to learn it for the first time Once again, progress slowed. Izzy believed that the problems were the result of trying to balance the eventual quality of the game with the costs of developing it. ‘There is always something of a tradeoff between the efficiency of the development process and the quality of the game that comes out of the process. Just to make things more complicated, you have to wait until the game is almost fully developed before you can judge quality, in terms of how much fun it is to play. So, you have to manage the development process in the best way you think will promote both creativity and efficiency. Both Izzy and Ollie liked the idea of giving as much freedom as possible to individual developers within the team. Compared to many studios the atmosphere was relaxed. On the whole it was thought that this had led to a good creativity that would eventually show through in the final game. Oli also thought that a more relaxed attitude helped to develop and retain the best development talent. ’Developers value legibility to innovate and more ownership over the content they are working on, and some degree of independence from micromanagement. All too easily they can find another studio where they feel their skills are more
valued.’
However, there were times when it proved less than fully efficient. For example, at one time two developers each designed their own different versions of the same scene because their work had not been coordinated, costing several days of wasted effort. There were also problems in managing the studio’s regular contract work alongside the Ferrybridge project. At times the studio’s other work took development resource away from the project. As one frustrated developer put it: ’It could be frustrating to suddenly have a colleague taken off the project for a week to work on another job, but hey, it was the revenue from this other work that was funding the project so naturally it took priority. Nevertheless, there were times when the other jobs were vacuuming up resources, and the whole development process was like being in a pressure cooker.’
Project crunch and financial crunch
By November it was becoming obvious that Ferrybridge was in trouble. It had fallen well behind schedule and the studio’s cash projections were looking bad. The studio’s cash statement and projection at this time is shown in Table 3.3. It indicated that the company would need to draw further on its overdraft facilities in the current quarter and would need more substantial funding in the new year. It was clear that even if all went well and they had no further problems, thesoonest they could launch would be half-way through the following year. Even achieving this would probably involve what game developers call ‘crunch’: working
extended hours of overtime (paid and unpaid) for periods of time in order to hit a particular deadline.Oli was despondent: ‘The real frustration is that the game is looking good. Everybody who has worked on it loves the storyline and are wowed by the graphics. We just need a final effort. It’s tempting to see crunch’ as a failure of planning. But honestly I’ve never worked on a development that has not involved some degree of crunch.’ It was Izzy who finally made the decision in the November. ‘We have been working on this project for 18 months. That’s not long for a game of this complexity. And it’s really good, everyone agrees. Put the potential of a game and the financial viability of its development process are different things. Basically, we have run out of credit and we have to accept that we need help. The most likely source of helpis going to be a publisher. They could fund the remainder of this development from their small change. OK, they will demand a part of the company, and we would lose much of our independence. But it’s either that, or abandon the development, let go probably a third of our staff, and try to get an emergency loan from our bank.’
Questions
1. Was it a mistake for Wide scale to embark on the fiery bride development?
2. List the reasons that could have contributed to the fiery bride development falling behind schedule.
3. What would you have done differently?
4. What would you advise Izzy and Oil to do now, and why?](../images/anyone-who-has-been-involved-with-designing-and-constructing-video-games-will-255549-2.jpg)
![Anyone who has been involved with designing and constructing video games will tell you that game development never goes as planned. I sometimes think that it is a miracle that any game gets developed. Technical glitches, bottlenecks in production, conflicting creative egos, pressure from publishers, they will all throw you off course during the development cycle. It is a process that occupies the area on the borderline between art and technology. Yet, although video game development is an uncertain and complex process, it is how the development process is managed that is the key feature in whether a game will go on to be a success.’ (Izzy McNally, Co-Owner Widescale Studios was a videogame development studio, located in the midlands of the UK. It had been founded seven years ago by Izzy McNally and Oli Chambers, when they left a larger studio to gain ‘some creative independence’. Video game software development studios are the organizations that actually create the games. There are many thousands of such studios worldwide, some large, but most employing less than 30 people.13 Some studios are owned by video game publishers, of which some also produce gaming hardware, and some, like Widescale, are independent. Publishers market and sell the games, manage relationships with distributors, platform providers and retailers, conduct market research and advertise games.
Originally from California, Izzy was, by background, an artist and writer. Oli started as a programmer, but had moved into becoming an executive producer. (In the industry, an executive producer is the person who is responsible for the overall coordination of the development.) Both Izzy and Oli admitted that their desire for more creative independence had not fully materialized: ‘Since we started, we have been surviving as an independent studio by taking on contracts from the bigger studios, and we have built a good reputation. But if we don’t have another contract ready to go when the last one finishes; we are in trouble. It can be dispiriting constantly looking for work to keep us aƃoat. That was why (ierybryde was so exciting.’ (Oli Chambers)
The Ferrybridge project
Ferrybridge was an idea for a role-playing game (RPG) that had come out of a number of brainstorming sessions between Izzy, Oli and Hussein Malik in the middle of an unusually warm and pleasant summer. Hussein was a developer and self-confessed ‘fanatical gamer’ who had joined Widescale soon after it was founded. A role-playing game is a video game in which players assume the roles of characters who are protagonists in a fictional setting. The senior team at Widescale were excited at the conceptof Ferrybridge, and saw it as an opportunity to develop a game of their own that would (potentially) give them both creative and financial independence. The Ferrybridge concept was intriguing, although not totally novel. The game’s
setting was a combination of space exploration and ‘wild west’ adventure (Ferrybridge was the name of the spaceship in the story) with various characters who possessed different skills and psychological traits. The purpose of the game was to build an intergalactic trading empire while avoiding interference from political and commercial rivals.
Traditionally, independent studios who wanted to develop a game such as Ferrybridge had four methods of raising funds. First, they could pitch the idea to a publisher. Most video game development was funded by big publishers. However, publishers almost always insisted on terms that were more favorable to them than the developers. Second, the studio could seek private investors who would put their own money into the company and share any subsequent profits. The downside to this for Izzy and Oli would be a certain loss of independence. Third, the studio could attempt to raise money by crowdfunding, asking for (relatively small) donations from thousands of potential future users of the game in return for preferential access to the finished game. It was an increasingly popular method of raising funding, but limited to relatively small sums in total, often less than £1 million (the typical budget for an RPG would be tens of millions of pounds or more). Finally, the studio could start the development from their own saved capital, then fund the ongoing costs from the profits from their other work. This was the approach chosen by Widescale, who had a retained cash pot of around £700,000. If successful, Ferrybridge could provide a stable stream of income, without substantial rights and royalties going tosome big publisher. In turn, this would let the studio pursue more interesting projects in the future. Table 3.2 shows Wide scale’s projected cash how forecast as of the start of
the project.
The development processes
Video game development is an uncertain and complex process, but a key feature in whether a game will go on to be a success is the way the development process is managed from concept through to launch. Although different studios use slightly different terms, game development is
broken down into three stages: pre-production, production and post-production. Pre-production is the stage where the developers have to answer some fundamental questions about the game, including the market it is aimed at, the platform it will play on, the type of game it is going to be, the budget, the basic storyline and the timescale (at least nominally). The production phase is usually the most
resource-intensive phase, and is often the phase that is the most uncertain and difficult to plan. It involves programmers, character artists, graphic designers, audio designers, voice actors, quality testers and producers who, in the words of Oli, ‘provide the glue that makes it all happen’. The aim of all of them is to make a game that will be original, fun and involving. They do this by using new gameplays, gripping underlying stories, enhanced graphics and convincing characters. If a game fails to meet users’ concepts of ‘quality play’, they could readily switch to other games. Post-production manages the transition of the game into the market. Often a publisher will become involved at this stage, if they weren’t before. Even at this stage, quality assurance continues because bugs in the software always continue to emerge. A ‘hype’ video extract from the game with a mix of graphics and sample gameplay will probably be released for
marketing purposes, and a spot at one of the major gaming conventions may be arranged.
Starting the Ferrybridge developmentWork started on the outline of the Ferrybridge concept over the summer, with Izzy drafting an outline script and Oli working on some technical issues such as the number of ‘levels’ the game should have and how many maps it should contain. The project was formalized with its own budget in September, when Hussein was asked to put together plans for how the development would progress. His first decision was to hire Ross Avery, who had been his boss at his previous studio. Ross had wide experience in the game development industry, largely in senior executive developer and producer roles.
Ross and Hussein formed the core of the Ferrybridge team and were joined by planners and developers, both newly recruited and moved from Wide scale’s other work. However, Oli recognized that Ferrybridge should not put any of the studio’s regular projects at risk. ‘They are our “bread and butter”, each has a deadline and a budget that we must stick to. (aerobridge has more edibility because it’s directly under our control. Of course, we had a budget for it, but there was still considerable edibility. 5o we looked at the budget and asked the question, do we want a team of 10 people working for 10 months or a team of 20 people working for five months! Theoretically, one could even have had a team of two people working for 50 months, but that would have been ridiculous. Also, at different times inthe development process one will need different numbers of developers with specific skills. The balance was always between allocating the appropriate resources to Ferrybridge without interfering with our other work.’
By November it had become clear that Izzy would have to decide whether to take on responsibility for developing the games script herself or to hire-in a script writer. In the
end she hired a part-time script writer who had experience of television work. Izzy admitted that it was a mistake: ‘Script writing for a video game is totally different from writing for television or writing a novel. I underestimated this. In a script for television the narrative moves in a linear
direction. With a video game the narrative is more like a tree. Each player can move along different branches of the tree depending on the decisions that they make. A script
writer has to make up dialogue for many different scenarios, knowing that each individual player will see only one of them. It wasn’t the fault of the writer we hired, it was my fault in underestimating the differences. In the end I had to take over far more of the script writing than I had intended.’
The scripting and storyboarding of the game continued into the new year, but by January tensions had begun to emerge between Oli, who was concerned about the rate that the project was burning though the budget, and Ross, who wanted the script,characterizations and overall architecture of the game settled before the production phase commenced. Oli wanted to get the production stage of development started as soon as possible. ‘Wide scale’s strength was in the actual production stage of development. That’s what we spend most of our time doing. If we
weren’t good at keeping to schedule, we couldn’t have survived as a contract developer. Also, I thought that we had an outline script and the overall structure of the game more or less sorted from mine and Izzy’s work over the summer. I do understand that when a new person like 4oss first Loins the team, the temptation is to try to sit down at the beginning of the development process and settle the whole script from start to finish. $ut it has to develop naturally; developing the script for a game is essentially an iterative process’.
The production phases
Although there were still uncertainties, and some disagreement around the game’s storyline, by the end of January Olihad decided to formally move on to the production phase and allocated developers and artists to the project. He also started briefing the freelance graphics designers, sound designers and voice artists that they would need later in the process. In early February Ross resigned. He was philosophical about it: ‘It’s not unusual in this business. There will always be some tension between whoever is in charge of operationalizing a concept and the studio owner. The important thing is who holds the budget! In this case the owners [Oli and Izzy] didn’t want to give up control. It’s their company and their money, so I guess they have the
last word on any decisions, big or small. But, personally, I like to have more control than they wanted to give me.’From that point Oli acted as executive producer for the project, with Hussein overseeing technical issues and Izzy ‘creative’ ones. However, during the spring, the development fell increasingly behind schedule. Hussein admitted that many of the problems were the result of their own decisions. ‘We started using a new 3D graphics package two months into the initial development. It allowed a new rendering approach that looked particularly exciting. It made the graphics better than we thought possible. It did give us some spectacular effects, but also gave us two problems.
First, we totally underestimated the learning curve necessary to master the package. It took our developers a month or two to get used to the package and this delayed things more than we envisaged. Second, it became clear relatively quickly that the effect of the change was to knock
the game’s ‘frame rate’ down to the point where it looked poor. We knew the choice would affect frame rate but we just didn’t anticipate the impact this would have on what the game felt like to play. Both these things undermined our ability to estimate how long some key stages of the
development might take. Without the ability to estimate the individual development tasks it became particularly difficult to schedule the development as a whole.’
By June, the development team were overcoming the
problems with the new graphics package, when a further problem emerged. Hussein and Oli had decided to use a previously untried (by Widescale) game engine. (A game
engine provides the software framework that allows developers to create video games.) Many commercial game engines are available to help game developers. Using one means that developers can focus solely on the logic of the game rather than getting bogged down in detail. A game engine allows code reuse, which usually means shorter development time and reduced cost. But not when a development team needs to learn it for the first time Once again, progress slowed. Izzy believed that the problems were the result of trying to balance the eventual quality of the game with the costs of developing it. ‘There is always something of a tradeoff between the efficiency of the development process and the quality of the game that comes out of the process. Just to make things more complicated, you have to wait until the game is almost fully developed before you can judge quality, in terms of how much fun it is to play. So, you have to manage the development process in the best way you think will promote both creativity and efficiency. Both Izzy and Ollie liked the idea of giving as much freedom as possible to individual developers within the team. Compared to many studios the atmosphere was relaxed. On the whole it was thought that this had led to a good creativity that would eventually show through in the final game. Oli also thought that a more relaxed attitude helped to develop and retain the best development talent. ’Developers value legibility to innovate and more ownership over the content they are working on, and some degree of independence from micromanagement. All too easily they can find another studio where they feel their skills are more
valued.’
However, there were times when it proved less than fully efficient. For example, at one time two developers each designed their own different versions of the same scene because their work had not been coordinated, costing several days of wasted effort. There were also problems in managing the studio’s regular contract work alongside the Ferrybridge project. At times the studio’s other work took development resource away from the project. As one frustrated developer put it: ’It could be frustrating to suddenly have a colleague taken off the project for a week to work on another job, but hey, it was the revenue from this other work that was funding the project so naturally it took priority. Nevertheless, there were times when the other jobs were vacuuming up resources, and the whole development process was like being in a pressure cooker.’
Project crunch and financial crunch
By November it was becoming obvious that Ferrybridge was in trouble. It had fallen well behind schedule and the studio’s cash projections were looking bad. The studio’s cash statement and projection at this time is shown in Table 3.3. It indicated that the company would need to draw further on its overdraft facilities in the current quarter and would need more substantial funding in the new year. It was clear that even if all went well and they had no further problems, thesoonest they could launch would be half-way through the following year. Even achieving this would probably involve what game developers call ‘crunch’: working
extended hours of overtime (paid and unpaid) for periods of time in order to hit a particular deadline.Oli was despondent: ‘The real frustration is that the game is looking good. Everybody who has worked on it loves the storyline and are wowed by the graphics. We just need a final effort. It’s tempting to see crunch’ as a failure of planning. But honestly I’ve never worked on a development that has not involved some degree of crunch.’ It was Izzy who finally made the decision in the November. ‘We have been working on this project for 18 months. That’s not long for a game of this complexity. And it’s really good, everyone agrees. Put the potential of a game and the financial viability of its development process are different things. Basically, we have run out of credit and we have to accept that we need help. The most likely source of helpis going to be a publisher. They could fund the remainder of this development from their small change. OK, they will demand a part of the company, and we would lose much of our independence. But it’s either that, or abandon the development, let go probably a third of our staff, and try to get an emergency loan from our bank.’
Questions
1. Was it a mistake for Wide scale to embark on the fiery bride development?
2. List the reasons that could have contributed to the fiery bride development falling behind schedule.
3. What would you have done differently?
4. What would you advise Izzy and Oil to do now, and why?](../images/anyone-who-has-been-involved-with-designing-and-constructing-video-games-will-255549-3.jpg)
extended hours of overtime (paid and unpaid) for periods of time in order to hit a particular deadline.Oli was despondent: ‘The real frustration is that the game is looking good. Everybody who has worked on it loves the storyline and are wowed by the graphics. We just need a final effort. It’s tempting to see crunch’ as a failure of planning. But honestly I’ve never worked on a development that has not involved some degree of crunch.’ It was Izzy who finally made the decision in the November. ‘We have been working on this project for 18 months. That’s not long for a game of this complexity. And it’s really good, everyone agrees. Put the potential of a game and the financial viability of its development process are different things. Basically, we have run out of credit and we have to accept that we need help. The most likely source of helpis going to be a publisher. They could fund the remainder of this development from their small change. OK, they will demand a part of the company, and we would lose much of our independence. But it’s either that, or abandon the development, let go probably a third of our staff, and try to get an emergency loan from our bank.’
Questions
1. Was it a mistake for Wide scale to embark on the fiery bride development?
2. List the reasons that could have contributed to the fiery bride development falling behind schedule.
3. What would you have done differently?
4. What would you advise Izzy and Oil to do now, and why?
> Is information technology helping managers communicate more efficiently and effectively? Explain your answer.
> Explain why it’s important to study management.
> Describe what managers do.
> Define management.
> Tell who managers are and where they work.
> How Can I Have a Successful Career?
> Discuss trust as the essence of leadership.
> Describe modern views of leadership and the issues facing today’s leaders.
> Describe the four major contingency leadership theories.
> Compare and contrast early leadership theories.
> Define leader and leadership.
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> Compare and contrast contemporary theories of motivation.
> Compare and contrast early theories of motivation.
> Define and explain motivation.
> Discuss contemporary issues in OB.
> How Can I Show My Professionalism?
> Discuss learning theories and their relevance in shaping behavior.
> Describe perception and the factors that influence it.
> Describe different personality theories.
> Explain the role that attitudes play in job performance.
> Identify the focus and goals of organizational behavior (OB).
> Discuss contemporary issues in managing teams.
> Discuss how groups are turned into effective teams.
> Describe the major concepts of group behavior.
> Define group and describe the stages of group development.
> Explain what workforce diversity and inclusion are and how they affect the HRM process.
> What is a Decision Trees?
> Discuss contemporary issues in managing human resources.
> Describe strategies for retaining competent, high-performing employees.
> Explain how employees are provided with needed skills and knowledge.
> Discuss the tasks associated with identifying and selecting competent employees.
> Describe the key components of the human resource management process and the important influences on that process.
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> Compare and contrast traditional and contemporary organizational designs.
> Identify the contingency factors that favor either the mechanistic model or the organic model of organizational design.
> Describe six key elements in organizational design.
> Explain how entrepreneurs control organizations for growth, downturns, and exiting the venture.
> Define Payoff Matrices
> Define Early Management
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> Action Response is a London-based charity dedicated to providing fast responses to critical situations throughout the world. It was founded by Susan Nutini, its Chief Executive, to provide relatively short-term aid for small projects until they could obt
> Revisit the case example that examines legal and general’s modular housing venture. Does their use of a factory to ‘build’ houses invalidate the idea that volume and variety govern the nature of operations processes?
> Visit a supermarket and observe people’s behavior. You may have to exercise some discretion when doing this; people generally don’t like to be stalked around the supermarket too obviously. (a) What layout type is a conventional supermarket and how does i
> The table below shows the planned time and budget for a legal consulting project being developed for a client in Copenhagen, Denmark. Complete an earned value analysis (EVA) for the project based at the end of month 4, given that only activities A, B and
> The table below shows the activities, their durations and predecessors for designing, writing and installing a bespoke computer database for a commercial bank headquartered in Singapore. Draw a network diagram (activity-on-node) for the project and calcu
> Revisit the Vasa project example in this chapter. (a) Who should be held responsible for this disaster? (b) What can be learnt from the Vasa story for the management of different kinds of modern-day projects?
> Four Seasons Hotels is a chain of very ‘upmarket’ hotels famed for its quality of service. From its inception the group has had the same guiding principle, to make the quality of our service our competitive advantage. The company has what it calls its Go
> Focus plastics originally made precision plastic components for the Aerospace sector, together with some basic (cheap) ‘homeware’ items such as buckets and dustpans. However, competition became intense in this market, so they decided to specialize in hom
> Consider a country operating under fixed exchange rates. The IS curve is given by equation (20.1) a. Explain the term (i* - πe). Why does the foreign nominal interest rate appear in the relation? b. Explain why when πe increases, t
> Human error is a significant source of quality problems. Think through the times that you have (with hindsight) made an error and answer the following questions. (a) How do you think that human error causes quality problems? (b) What could one do to mini
> Step 1 – As a group, identify a ‘high visibility’ operation that you all are familiar with. This could be a type of quick service restaurant, record stores, public transport systems, libraries, etc. Step 2 – Once you have identified the broad class of op
> A transport services company provides a whole range of services to railway operators. Its reputation for quality was a valuable asset in its increasingly competitive market. ‘We are continually looking for innovation in the way we deliver our services be
> For over 10 years, a hotel group, had been developing self-managed improvement groups within its hotels. At one hotel reception desk, staff were concerned about the amount of time the reception desk was left unattended. To investigate this, the staff beg
> Develop cause–effect diagrams for the following types of problem: • staff waiting too long for their calls to be answered at their IT helpdesk; • poor food in the company restaurant; • poor lecturing from teaching staff at a university; • customer compla
> Everything we do can be broken down into a process’ said Lucile, COO of an outsourcing business for the ‘back office’ functions of a range of companies. ‘It may be more straightforward in a manufacturing business, but the concept of process improvement i
> Sophie was sick of her daily commute. ‘Why’, she thought ‘should I have to spend so much time in a morning stuck in traffic listening to some babbling halfwit on the radio? We can work flexi- time after all. Perhaps I should leave the apartment at some o
> A production process is required to produce 980 of product X, 560 of product Y and 280 of product Z in a 4-week period. If the process works 7 hours per day and 5 days per week, devise a mixed model schedule per hour that would meet this demand.
> Examine the marking process of an assignment you are currently working on. What is the typical elapsed time between handing the assignment in and receiving it back with comments? How much of this elapsed time do you think is value added time?
> An insurance underwriting process consists of the following separate stages. What is the value-added percentage for the process? (Hint – use Little’s law to work out how long applications have to wait at each stage bef
> The health clinic described in the worked example earlier in the chapter has expanded by hiring one extra employee and now has six employees. It has also leased some new health monitoring equipment which allows patients to be processed faster. This means
> Consider this record of an ordinary flight. ‘Breakfast was a little rushed but left the house at 6.15. Had to return a few minutes later, forgot my passport. Managed to find it and leave (again) by 6.30. Arrived at the airport 7.00, dropped Angela off wi
> The Zucchero mail-order clothing company in Milan receives order forms, types in the customer details, checks the information provided from the customers and that the products are in stock, confirms payment and processes the order. During an average eigh
> What elements of lean are described in the Toyota Production System (TPS)?
> A lunch kiosk serves two meals every day: Veggie Fritters and Mushroom Stroganoff, the recipes for which are as follows. Veggie Fritters (serves 10) – Prepair the ‘veggie mix’ by grating 500 g of carrots, 500 g of courgettes (zucchini), and chopping 300
> Your company has developed a simple, but amazingly effective mango peeler. It is constructed from a blade and a supergrip handle that has a top piece and a bottom piece. The assembled mango peeler is packed in a simple recycled card pack. All the parts s
> Re-read the ‘Operations in practice’ example, ‘‘What a waste!’. Why did things go wrong with the relationship between SAP and Waste Management?
> Re-read the ‘Operations in practice’ example, ‘The life and times of a chicken salad sandwich Part 2’. Why do you think that integrating an ERP system with those of suppliers and customers is so difficult?
> Re-read the ‘Operations in practice’ example, ‘SAP and its partners’. If you were managing SAP’s strategic partner programme, how would you ensure their long-term collaboration?
> Rolls-Royce is one of the world’s largest manufacturers of gas turbines. They are exceptionally complex products, typically with around 25,000 parts, and hundreds of sub-assemblies, and their production is equally complex with over 600 external suppliers
> Re-read the ‘Operations in practice’ example on ‘An inventory of energy’. It mentions the potential of battery storage of energy, but stresses the cost of this method. What do you think would be the implications for energy distribution if batteries becom
> Xexon7 is a specialist artificial intelligence (AI) development firm that develops algorithms for various on-line services. As part of its client service it has a small (10-person) help-desk call centre to answer client queries. Clients could contact the
> Revisit the ‘Operations in practice’ example on the Blood and Transplant service at the beginning of the chapter. (a) What are the factors which constitute inventory holding costs, order costs, and stock-out costs in a National Blood Service? (b) What ma
> Our suppliers often offer better prices if we are willing to buy in larger quantities. This creates a pressure on us to hold higher levels of stock. Therefore, to find the best quantity to order we must compare the advantages of lower prices for purchase
> A fruit canning plant has a single line for three different fruit types. Demand for each type of tin is reasonably constant at 50,000 per month (a month has 160 production hours). The tinning process rate is 1,200 per hour, but it takes 2 hours to clean
> A local shop has a relatively stable demand for tins of sweetcorn throughout the year, with an annual total of 1400 tins. The cost of placing an order is estimated at £15 and the annual cost of holding inventory is estimated at 25 per cent of the product
> A supplier makes monthly shipments to ‘House & Garden Stores, in average lot sizes of 200 coffee tables. The average demand for these items is 50 tables per week, and the lead time from the supplier 3 weeks. ‘House & Garden Stores’ must pay for inventory
> Airline catering is a tough business. Meals must be of a quality that is appropriate for the class and type of flight, yet the Airlines who are their customers are always looking to keep costs as low as possible, menus must change frequently and respond
> Many companies devise a policy on ethical sourcing covering such things as workplace standards and business practices, Health and Safety conditions, human rights, legal systems, child labour, disciplinary practices, wages and benefits, etc. (a) What do y
> If you were the owner of a small local retail shop, what criteria would you use to select suppliers for the goods that you wish to stock in your shop? Visit two or three shops that are local to you and ask the owners how they select their suppliers. In w
