How to get into the games industry
The Project Manager
- Introduction
- The games development process
- A perspective from Eurocom
- The Project Manager
- The Producer
- The Designer
- The Artist and Animator
- The Programmer
- The Sound Designer
- The Games Tester
- In Final - links and resources
Project Managers have the busy task of making sure that the project runs as smoothly as possible. This primarily involves managing team members, planning and allocating work with the team leads and ensuring clear communication between all groups.
One of the Project Managers main responsibilities is setting realistic deliverables for the milestones and detailing these to the publishers. The Project Manager must work very closely with the Producer and other team leads to break the game design into detailed pieces of work and allocate these to team members in line with the project priorities. From this a master schedule is created and this work is then tracked through the project lifecycle. The Project Manager will monitor the teams work on a day to day basis to ensure deadlines are met, work is delegated and update the schedule to take into account changes to priorities, risk management and unforeseen problems. To do this effectively the Project Manager needs to have a full understanding of the project requirements and all aspects of game development.In addition to planning and scheduling responsibilities a Project Manager must have good people management skills. Managing a large team of people can throw up many interesting situations and the Project Manager must be firm or flexible as the situation requires and have the confidence of their team to make the right decisions. The Project Manager needs to ensure that their team is motivated at all times - from project conception right through to project completion and be proactive in meeting the team's changing needs.
The final main responsibility of the Project Manager is to make sure there is clear communication on the team. This not only means within the team itself but also clear and concise reporting to the company directors and to the publisher.
Coordinating and fusing the wide range of elements involved in the development of a game makes the position of Project Manager wildly challenging, yet rewarding and enjoyable.