Planning hell

Gah, now I remember why I stopped using MS Project for planning – it has a nasty tendency to fight back in strange and unusual ways if you try to do anything out of line with how it thinks you should be making a plan. Great if I was a real-estate developer and needed to plan painters and builders and electricians, not so good when I have to plan games development.

The only thing Project is really good for is tracking resources and dependencies between tasks, and coming up with raw numbers as to how long things will take given X many people who can work for Y amount of time. Using it to try and order tasks or define exactly how things work is madness though – I far prefer the Agile methods for that, which involve reevaluating every couple of weeks and choosing the most important things to work on.

So after my planning blitz, I’m off down south for the weekend, followed by a trip across to Brighton for the Develop conference next week. Its easier to just stay down there and work from hotels/coffee houses in Brighton than to come back up and down on Monday/Tuesday, so essentially I’m away for the whole week. I’ll still be working on trying to close this development deal however, as it is quite an attractive deal. I’ll probably end up taking a few games down with me as well though – I’ve gotten hooked on KotOR again, trying to get through it playing for the dark side.

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Last modified: February 06 2020.