[BUSINESS/SYSTEM ANALYSIS][PROJECT MANAGEMENT]

Hi SirR9,

We definitely appreciate your offer to help, however, due to the nature of this project being one of a volunteer effort with varying schedules, waterfall/scrum may be too formal for an environment such as ours. If we had scrum and someone was "blocked", there is no one to turn to in most cases, it's really up to the individual to figure it out as a lot of what we're doing involves some level of specialized skill/reverse engineering which doesn't exist among many individuals.

Really we need more of a product manager who can identify areas that need staffing and then recruit individuals for that position. If you're still interested in helping though, give a post below and we'll bring you on our Discord channel to discuss possibilities.

I'm a new user and was beginning to follow the skywind project but noticed that this seems to be a glaring issue if not internally with the development team, definitely externally with the community and for recruitment of more volunteer effort.

Taerkalith, I do agree with your comment that skywind is a volunteer effort for which you can't assign deadlines.  However, the rest of the project management tracking still applies.  There should be a categorization of deliverables to complete skywind and effort estimates for those deliverables.  We should be able to track all contributors who are assigned tasks and understand current or last known ownership.  This will not give you a "we are on track for Q1 of 2018" but it would at least give you a work estimate and % complete estimate.

The % level of completeness and tracking what needs to be done is a huge attractor for talent where you need it.  It also reduces the questioning from the community and gives people a sense of progress over time.

There are various open source project management tools to explore where hosting public projects is free so cost shouldn't be an issue.

Thanks,

ibanez1

@Ibanez, we use trello extensively along with other mgmt tools. We are aware of what we'd like to get done and a rough sense of % of progress in each dept, except where we are trying to do revolutionary techniques, which can't easily be allotted for time. We don't do detailed analysis of amount of time a task will take, as it will be so detached from the actual timeline of getting completed it isn't a useful tool, and in most cases would waste our time and demoralize when we could work on the project. If for example I told you caves alone would take 3000 hours, is that really a useful figure for anyone? Not really, and often could even be demoralizing rather than useful, but knowing that % of caves is completed is useful when focusing on dept->dept workflow of assets/level design/navmeshing/NPC work etc. We keep those estimates internal as there will always be some idiot who will go asking about unrealistic release dates or not understanding the data properly and we'd rather not deal with fabricated third party deadlines which media/community will latch onto and cause our media people headaches dispelling.

Taerkalith,

I want to make clear my arm-chair quarterback viewpoint is by no means a clear picture of what's going on internally [External image]. I recently offered to start volunteering for the coding department so hopefully that experience will give me a better perspective of the process.  I just know for large projects such as this, without proper itemization of even byte size tasks to complete, it can be hard to see the end goal for the sheer amount of work that has to be done.   I thought a public understanding of what was still left may attract talent in the correct areas but you guys may have already been burned by that experiment previously.  Anyways, amazing work so far and I look forward to contributing.

ibanez1