Today marked the FIRST official sprint review at the, now upgraded, Blue Dot Games. And it was a doozy
In a little over a month we’ve moved from about 10 staff to nearly 30 and there’s a few more to come throughout this month until we finally STOP (I hope) – talk about growing at scale huh?
My work in the games industry continues to be really interesting but also, at times, very hectic and even just a little bit unwieldy. But, like many things, unless you’re an old hand at stuff like this it’s all just a great big lesson learning how things work and which things don’t so well.
I remember reading somewhere that hard work is it’s own reward, I’ll be quite happy when the hard work is less hard, not that I don’t want it, but sometimes it’s nice to look at the virtual to do list and see it’s not running all the way down the street!
We have now, more or less, filled out our team that was included on our project plan. To scale to that number imagine the number of applicants sifted, interviews held, deliberations had, all on top of the day to day; payroll, HR, finance, operations, devops, so many little jobs and forms.
So to get to the end of this week and be ahead on next weeks paperwork, clear down the email queue to more or less nothing, and yes I am still doing that inbox zero thing, and well, I can quit for the day happy that I’m keeping up with it all still.
This week saw our first official sprint review, and that was a wonderful capper to the week, it was really good to see the culmination of all of the work during this period and have our people talk about it, show examples, give great insight. At first I was a bit indifferent to a meeting at that point of the week but I can’t comfortably say it’s a really relevant time to do it and that is definitely a lesson learned.
One other lesson is that it IS possible to type up a complete blog post in a single sitting, without too much procrastination OR extra words, so there’s that too!