The ZGXP (Part 7 - Wait, What Now?)

I was talking with a friend of mine from back in Indiana recently. He commented that he had been reading my blog and liked my game reviews. We got on the topic of gaming for a while, but once that conversation had died down he asked, "So, what exactly do you do at this internship you keep talking about?"

It's a valid question, and one I hadn't really thought to answer. Production is kind of a nebulous things, not nearly as concrete as coding or creating art. It's a lot of project management, team leadership, and resource management. I basically make sure that everyone working on my projects is working as efficiently as possible. I keep track of what people are doing and make sure nothing stops them from doing what they should be doing. I also do quality assurance for the projects I'm working on. I need to ensure the projects are kicking sufficient ass at all times. In order to do all this, I have to know what's going on in my projects at all times. I keep track of everything from a bird's-eye view while everyone on my team is working in the trenches. At the same time, I have to know the details of what is going on and what needs to get done so I can delegate tasks to my team members.

The iPhone Reader app was my high priority project last week. I had been doing bug testing and tracking on our internal project, but since we got the new pages the Reader project has moved up on the to-do list. Now I just check in with the internal project team during morning meetings, then move over to the Reader project. I'd been working on creating the panels with our artist so that would move more quickly, but once that neared completion, I started setting things up for the next steps that would follow in the coming days. I contacted the client and got some copy and art assets we'd need. I met with our engineer so he could show us how to actually incorporate these assets. Normally I'd just grab him and have him explain it to me, but he's busy with another project that had a higher priority than mine. His time is valuable and needs to allocated carefully. In a more quality assurance role, I also met with our producer to discuss feedback we got from the team on a postmortem for the first phase of the Reader project. I'm currently writing a presentation for the postmortem and to deliver to the team.

Production tends to be a very fluid thing. You've got to juggle a lot of balls at once, and the weight of each ball is constantly varying. It's a tricky job. I've dropped a ball or two, but I'm learning a lot and enjoying it. Like I said earlier, every day is different, but that's what keeps it interesting.