Late blogging: Case Study 2: Team Dynamics

After reading the whole story of VC team, I am very sorry for the unexpected end. At first I thought the team very promising. They have talented people, good designer, experienced game developers. Though there is a lack of programmers, it's not big problem. If there is a problem, that may be the underestimation of technical difficulties of some implementations. And  for a team with such a big ambition, the school time is of course not enough for them to implement it. So their decision to extend to the vacation time is sensible. But it also leads the problem of commitment. The problem appears to be the inconvenience of the meeting and some other individual issues. I think the main reason for the lack of commitment is the lack of stress and wearing down passion. It's very common for people to slack when there is no enough stress. So to gain the power to do something difficult, we need great passions. For the team, I think they are a bit too ambitious at the first time,that may be the reason why they lost the confidence and passion after a few months' struggling. Fortunately, their great effort put on the project are not in vain. They gained experience, friendship,and some technology.

 To learn from the case. I have the following things in mind:

Usually, we are not lucky enough to get the best configuration of a team with four people. So we have to optimize the existing manpowers. Unlike the VC team, our team lacks designer. That may be a big problem. Even we get some help from our friends, we can't ensure their full commitment. Especially that our project is a game, so the graphic is a main aspect which attracts users. So we have to either find some designer who can commit fully with us, or make our game concise and strategical. If the VC team had predicted the difficulty of dealing  with all those real-time and flash thing, they may rethink their design. I think a good facebook game don't have to be real-time. It depends on both the teams programming strength. So with so many artists and experienced game designers, they have the ability to design some attracting game even with just some texts and images.

And about the commitment. This may be the hardest part. At this time, all project dues, mid terms, experiments are coming one by one. We are waken up with the message that we have some other modules to learn other than 3216. And the passion seems die down a bit after the first two projects. That is the time to make the difficult choice. But do we really have choices? It's already decided when we decided to take the module. So we should just try to focus on everything and keep stressed till the end of the sem. And no one know what will happen after that, maybe we will be extremely successful and start a new journey or we just go back to normal life without success. Anyway we learned a lot in the process, and also from those talented people we met. Anyway I hope there will be no regrets left and the vacation should be a new start.