Written by Dong, 2021 Cohort
Efficiency is a key index for developing teams. With increasing teamwork discussions happening around me, I am afraid that we might lose passion and motivation for creating. Losing motivation is a horrible thing for us, as we need to save energy to produce more interesting digital products and avoid being overwhelmed by trivialities. Financially speaking, we can also earn more money in the workplace if we complete more tasks in a limited time and with less conflict.
But the reality is not as we expected. Technology is well-developed, users’ demand for immersive experience has increased correspondingly. As a result, some AAA gaming and other entertainment industries have to speed up their development, at all cost. More complicated programming functions and vivid graphics require thousands of experts to come alive. Therefore, they use more resources to think, create and communicate, which lowers their efficiency instead.
We could improve this with a series of strategies. I strongly believe that future content making, especially for entertaining production is more like PUGC (professional user-generated content). This means a small group containing designers and developers come up with a specific solution to fix a specific problem in a short time. This idea is quite common in nowadays software development, and some people call it “agile process”.
“Agile” was firstly coined by Agile Alliance around 2001, but the concept of agile development was formed in the 1990s. It’s an effective way to respond to change and iterate for stakeholders in the process of software development.Agile Alliance came up with many principles to realize agile development, and there are also many models and tools like XP (Extreme programming)/ Scrum, to assist with. But in my opinion, rules are dead while people are alive, which means many developers and product managers won’t follow those complex principles. But two things are necessary for us and can also be used in the following project making. One is demand management. We should write down our demands and make everyone understand their mission. Cassie, for example, just introduced Notion and it has done well so far. Another one is to use a uniform platform. If we choose Wechat to communicate, we’d better not choose Whatsapp, as people may ignore some vital messages.
Agile development can be widely used in PUGC. It is flattering and cost-effective, and it sharply cuts down intermediaries, which attracts start-ups to gain profits through software and other digital entertaining content making. Though there are many theories enhancing teamwork efficiency, personally, the agile tool is a good start for us to dive into the digital media world.