In addition to being a game designer or engineer, one long term goal of mine is to become a video game producer! To accomplish this goal, I recently asked a few game producers I know what I could do to prepare myself to be a producer. They said:
Learn Jira and Confluence.
Become a Certified ScrumMaster.
To accomplish the latter, I decided to attend a ScrumMaster class this weekend and take the CSM exam. I got a perfect score, so I am now an official Certified ScrumMaster! (I also got a Jira certificate this week.)
What is Scrum?
To read the official description of Scrum, click here.
Scrum is a project management framework used to deliver complex products. It is built to avoid common problems in complex projects like:
Excessive crunch.
Building a project that nobody wants.
Running out of budget or time.
Without using the Scrum lingo, I would break down the Scrum process into the following high-level steps:
Generate ideas for potential features for your product.
Prioritize a list of those features.
Determine a length of time shorter than a month and longer than a week during which you will work on those features.
Select the highest priority features that you can commit to finishing within that allotted amount of time.
Work on those features for that allotted amount of time, no more or no less.
Present your completed work to relevant stakeholders.
Retrospective: Facilitate a discussion with your team how about they can work together better in the future.
Repeat, skipping step three. You generally use the same amount of time for every sprint of work.
Throughout this process, you also periodically refine your list of items to complete.
I am purposely not using the Scrum lingo above so people new to Scrum can more easily understand the process as a whole. I also left out a number of important steps for simplicity.