Don't Pass The Garbage
Good handovers will leave success in your wake
“Kitchen Kerplunk”
Perhaps you have experienced something similar to me. Back when I was at university, I shared a house with five other people. Our kitchen was fairly small, including the sink area. We did not have a dishwasher so our pots, pans and dishes had to be washed up by hand, and left to dry on the side next to the sink. However we had a common problem - there was never enough space on the side for everything to be left to dry. So what do we intelligent university students do, day after day? We balance the pots, pans, dishes, bowls, cups and glasses all on top of each other, carefully constructing a delicately engineered monument to kitchenware next to the sink. Proud of our work, we would then leave it to dry and go off to whatever else we were doing. Later, someone else looking to responsibly put our mess away, would be confronted with this ridiculous game of “kitchen kerplunk”, where one wrong touch would send the whole pile crashing to the tiles. Needless to say, we lost many a glass this way.
Set Up For Failure
As I’ve covered in my previous article on how often I have had to onboard myself, it is very common in game development to be brought into a team with very little structure to pick up and follow. I often arrive and there is little to no documentation that can be found anywhere to explain the myriad of standards, processes, contacts and habits that I need to be aware of. I say this as a producer; I dread to think what this is like if you have to figure out a team’s coding standards from scratch! I’ve come into teams where there are no meeting calendars, or come in where I’m handed a meeting calendar that is full of clashes, and told “oh you’ll just figure it out”. Producers commonly have to move between each others’ teams, and have to pick up their responsibilities, contacts and knowledge quickly enough that the ball does not get dropped in the meantime. If there is no information, or if the time is not spent to onboard someone to the vast array of detail and nuance that makes up a production role, then that person is being set up for failure.
Game producers rarely set each other up for failure on purpose, but it can easily happen by accident. You can give someone a feature, send them all your amazing spreadsheets, and gift them the Jira dashboards you were using to manage it all, but if you don’t spend time checking they’ve understood it, you could be setting them up for failure right now. Spreadsheets can be a labyrinthian nightmare if you are not the one who wrote it; the names and numbers and acronyms are meaningless, the formulas point to some other mysterious file somewhere, and you forget to mention that there are several numbers that are plain wrong, but you’ve just ignored them for the last 3 months because it wasn’t really important, and you were the only one reading this thing anyway. Now another person is trying to make sense of the super-advanced tool that your success was riding on, and it’s impossible, making the job impossible to succeed in until they rebuild it all over again, which could lead to weeks of mismanagement.
It’s not just spreadsheets; the meetings you run all develop rhythms and routines, with expectations of who talks when, how the conversations go, and who takes what kind of actions. Every contact will need an introduction before they know how you’re supposed to fit into the team; I specifically remember one time where a developer, upon finding out his usual sound designer had left, and that he would be working with someone new, said to me, dismissively: “Oh. I don’t have a relationship with him.” This was mind-blowing for me at the time, as I didn’t realise how deep a creative relationship the two had built over the previous few years, and it dawned on me just how much work was going to be needed to establish a new working relationship.
In this complex environment, it’s not just easy to set someone up for failure, it’s likely. So, if we’re going to be responsible wardens of our team, let’s look at how we can set people up for success after us.
Document Your Job
The scientist and wit Richard Feynman famously said to his students “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”, a sentence worth remembering when preparing to explain your job to another person. You should take the time to study what you do and document it; if you can write something down, you can be sure that you’ve got a much better understanding of it, and if you struggle then this is a sign of where your problems are. There is a famous idea in coding called “rubber duck debugging” in which a struggling coder is advised to explain their ailing code to a rubber duck until they inevitably hit a problem in their explanation, which is a sign that this is the part they have failed to understand correctly. If you can do the same, writing down how you run your meetings, how you manage your relationships, and how all your pipelines and processes work, then you will gradually push through all the areas of your job that are unclear, breaking through any uncertainties, until you have a crystal clear understanding of your job. When I wrote my book on game production, I found it forced me to crystallise so much of my understanding of game projects, the producer role and my own approaches to managing people.
Once you understand your job, it’s time to hand it over to someone else. But let us not be hasty…
Good Handovers Take Time
For each area that you are handing over, you can take inspiration from the old adage of “See one. Do one. Teach one.” and for each meeting, report and technical process you need your producer to take on, follow this routine:
“See one” - Have them watch as you perform the task, so they can see how everything is done correctly.
“Do one” - Let them attempt the task in front of you, with the freedom to ask you questions if they need.
“Teach one” - Have them document the task to ensure their understanding is fully-formed.
I am a great believer in getting people to document as they learn; whenever I am explaining a process or a new ritual to a younger producer I invite them to take notes of what I am demonstrating as it happens, to be later formalised into documentation. It comes with the dual benefit that they can show and confirm full understanding of the work, and they also have a trusted document to refer to in the future, so trusted because they wrote it themselves.
For a while I thought I might be able to skip some of this by creating really intuitive tools, workflows and spreadsheets, but it never works out that way; you always need to demonstrate how you - the human - interact with your job, and producer jobs can take a while to onboard someone to. For example, if there is a key meeting that you run once a week, it will take at least two to three weeks to go through the “See One, Do One, Teach One” routine, and you are going to have to do this with every meeting, tool and relationship you have in the job.
This may seem like a lot of work for something that will shortly not be your responsibility, but there is a reason for investing in this way: you can’t point to the great teams you’ve worked with if they fall apart just after you leave.
Leave Successful People In Your Wake
I take great pride in leaving a team in better shape than I found it. When I hand things over I want to be able to say “This is running fine, and keeping it going will be easy. There is even room for you to try new ideas.” As I go through my career, I want people to look at the features, games and teams that I have supported and see enduring success, which I can proudly say I was a part of. It’s also an essential skill if you want to grow a team; all of these handover processes work just the same if you are going up a rank and hiring a junior to replace you. The better you can hand over your responsibilities, the stronger the team supporting you, and the more free you are to take on your new roles with full commitment. So take the time to lay things out well for the next person, give good thorough handovers, and don’t pile up the dishes like a house of cards.
Outside of his day job as a game producer, Doug Pennant is a writer and speaker with a dream of growing a healthier and more confident game industry.
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