MS project is a producer’s dream…
I’m amazed at this little piece of software – it’s great and easy to use.
I can see how producer’s swear by it. I can also see how deluded producers can be by it. It’s great for them, so why don’t we apply this to everybody! My hammer is perfect for surgery and dentistry!
Seriously, Project makes a terrible production asset management tool. The amount of co-ordination required and labour just to get designs, models, textures checked off as done/approved would be insane. We let computers and software handle the repetitive and mundane for us. This is also why we have mainframes handle banking for us. Before computers, banks used to have people do everything by hand – count + dispense money, calculate interest, add up totals… ugh. Grunt work.
What Project is great for is planning and schedule – the preproduction side of things. You provide it with a list of tasks and durations then link these to resources and chain dependent tasks. In the end, you get a complete time-based visualization of the project and how each tasks are interrelated. It’s fantastic!
During the project, you can refer to the original Project file to verify you are on schedule (common in the entertainment industries I’ve worked in), but the day to day management of tasks should be left with a production co-ordinator (film/animation term) or an associate/junior producer (game business equivalent).
The problem is day to day management of games/animation/film is complicated – there are dozens of people producing truckloads of assets that require leads/directors to check and request changes that need to be tracked and then you have unreliable/sick/demoralized people and incorrect assumptions + time estimates. It’s nasty…. I have a solution and it’s not any way original because I discovered many others have arrived at the same solution repeatedly and in different industries. How people have implemented the solution… well that’s still industry/domain specific. Up next….
Add comment September 5th, 2007