Pick a specialism and discuss why your two methodologies may or may not work as a tool for managing and controlling your production within the industry setting.
500 words Essay
Games pathway approach
There are a wide range of methodologies that can be used to help a team when working on a production. These methodologies are a system of practices, techniques, procedures and rules that have been practiced by people for years that new teams can look to to help organise their team, an example being Scrum which encourages people to reguarly have team meetings to make sure you are on task and focused.
Most professionals, however, don't just use one of these methodologies and instead adopt a hybrid of methodologies that best suits their team. According to the PMI's "Pulse of the Profession", 89% of the project professionals they surveyed in 2019 said their organization implemented hybrid project management practices.
Scrum is a project management methodology which proposes principles and process to improve delivery, and it is one of the most popular frameworks for putting the Agile principles into practice within the software development industry. It helps to improve communication, teamwork and speed of development within a team. Scrum meetings are held by a team regularly to encourage communication and iterative improvement on the project.
Fundamentally, Scrum is about empowering a small and self-managing team to achieve and deliver a functional product by defining roles and responsibilities to create a healthy work environment.
Scrum could help a games development company, especially a small indie team, when working on a game that is in it's early stages of development. By holding regular meetings about how they are getting on with their own respective areas they can possibly get help if they are struggling or be told their work is going well. Additionally, this also allows any ideas people have to be brought forward and possibly be added to the list of areas to work on.
Kanban is another project management methodology that can be used within software development and other industries, including the games industry. Kanban focuses on Lean principles and a strict process to increase effciency. It's similar to Scrum, in the way that it's all about releasing early and often with a collaborative and self-managing team. Compared to Scrum, however, Kanban is about evolutionary change.
The easiest way to follow the Kanban methodology is to create categories as simple as "To-do", "Doing" and "Done". This can be done on any number of softwares or done simply with post-it notes on a board. Trello, an online tool, is a very popular way to follow the kanban principles and create lists of what needs to be done in the project and even separate them into teams.
Both Scrum and Kanban have pros and cons when it comes to being used in a company that is working on a game product. Scrum can be used to help encourage a member that doesn't usually communicate to talk to the rest of the team and see where they have done well, need to improve and likewise help other members of the team with their work. Kanban can help teams stay organised, always knowing what is done on the project, is being done and has yet to be started.
Scrum, however doesn't work well for those that aren't social and doesn't directly cover keeping track of what is done, being done and needs to be done like Kanban. Similarly, Kanban doesn't encourage a team to communicate together regularly like Scrum does. Therefore, it's best to have a hybrid of the two methodologies where you hold scrum meetings often and keep track of tasks on a trello board.