Case Study: Victor
Background: Right Person, Wrong Role

Victor was an art director and lead artist at a small, one-project company. The subject of a lead/director split emerged when the company grew to two- and then three-project teams with a corresponding growth in staff. Victor expressed the strong desire to remain director but also keep his hands in production as a lead -- an option that was afforded him based on his level within the company, his strong performance to that point in his role, and a miscalculation regarding the amount of management time that would be required to build and maintain a strong department.

Along with his director duties, Victor assumed the lead on the largest and most complex project while two other artists were selected for lead roles on the other games. Victor would oversee art development on these projects in the role of art director.

The company expanded very quickly and the management time commitments grew correspondingly. Victor, however, insisted that he maintain some projectlevel control because he felt that doing otherwise would lead to his production skills eroding and eventually lead to the loss of his ability to work in art direction at the company. Such fears are not uncommon, and are not totally unfounded either. As noted in Chapter 1, "How We Got Here," the game industry's technical advances happen very swiftly. Art-creation tools and methodology, as well as programming for different system architectures, can evolve considerably across the industry within the span of one project cycle.

Skills can become obsolete if one is not in a production environment during the transition or acting as a lead or director and involved in management on successive projects for a few years. The willingness to surrender reliance on production skills as a foundation for a professional is a huge psychological hurdle for directors in particular to resolve. These skills usually have been built up for years and have attracted many compliments as well as afforded the individual many professional opportunities.

To set those skills on which one has built a career aside and make a commitment to a management track is huge career decision -- one that should not be taken lightly. At the lead level, the concern is not perhaps as severe. Leads frequently are involved in production work and can often move in and out of the lead role depending on the project and studio needs. It can be a terrifying step, though, moving to the director level at a multi-project studio where your future power app looks like Microsoft Excel.

Note

The validity of this concern is reflected in the comments of one art director at the GDC Round Table, who noted that "The lead needs to be the one who can break the biggest bone." At some point during the Round Table, I usually say "Please raise your hand if you are an art director at a multi-project studio. Keep your hand raised if you still do a lot of production artwork." I do so in part to show the artists and lead artists in attendance the price of management in terms of production time lost due to time spent developing and maintaining technical skills.

Nonetheless, I'm always stunned by the large number of hands that remain raised -- typically about 80 percent. Interestingly, but also entirely anecdotally, some attending art directors have also expressed amazement at that high number in private one-on-one talks after the round table has broken up.

In Victor's case, he began managing his project as lead and giving wide latitude to the other art leads. The three leads met together once per week to compare notes and review project status, but Victor was never able to devote enough time to dig into preproduction efforts, art pipeline development, or personnel issues emerging on other teams. Few of these errors are ever apparent in the early stages of production and preproduction because so little is known about the project and early milestones tend to be softer than later ones, which require more game functionality and art polish.

In other words, it's easier to get away with stuff in the first third of a project if you don't have active and experienced oversight. Victor was not able to provide either, and chose to put the majority of his time and focus on the art lead duties for what was the largest project at the studio. There's nothing wrong with this arrangement in one-project studios, but in a multi-project studio, the director level exists primarily to supervise and support the department staff and project leads.

As evidenced in Figure 3.1, the departmental-supervision role is not insignificant. Ultimately, a few of the company's projects were cancelled over the years. These cancellations weren't necessarily related to the issues around Victor; some were due to the vagaries of the industry. Nonetheless, some were related to situations like his, which were found across all departments of the company.

Figure 3.1 A dual-matrix management structure representing a 48-person art department in a three-project company.

Analysis

Inexperience

The leadership failure in Victor's case is one of him and his fellow directors not having the experience of running a larger company or an understanding of the associated organizational needs. Victor was simply unable to manage the role of art director after the company reached a certain size. It was difficult to see the tipping point where project duties became so time consuming that departmental issues were suffering because the departmental growth occurred gradually, over a period of a few years.

During this time, both project complexity and Victor's department size expanded rapidly. By the time the company had been running between two and three projects simultaneously for a few years, Victor and the other senior managers had begun to sense the problem; subsequently, they and Victor decided that it was not in the best interests of the company for him to continue to devote time to both jobs.

He ultimately chose the role of lead artist over director because he felt that he gained more professional satisfaction from facing project-level challenges. He was also able to address his concern regarding the loss of his professional skills by this decision. A new director was promoted from within the art department, who immediately began making very positive and overdue adjustments to the department both in personnel and practices.

An ironic downside of Victor choosing to focus on the art lead role was that while his production skills had not declined very much, his ability to stay current with new practices and software had suffered. As a result, the succeeding projects at that developer did have quality issues that might not have existed had management recommended that he simply move into the director role, where his greater strengths may have been.

Founder's Syndrome

The practice of senior managers clinging to roles is particularly thorny because there are simply fewer people to tell themthe honest truth about the effect of their dual focus. The term "founder's syndrome" describes the condition that develops when founders or long-term legacy employees make decisions based on things as they were, not as they are.

The hope is that based on the level of their experience and maturity, they are more capable of grasping the situation and taking selfdirected action to change it, but the causes of inefficiency, poor project results, and poor retention are not always so clear as to point to a single problem that needs to be addressed. Self-awareness and awareness of project- and organization-level needs are also not given traits, regardless of level of talent and skill sets.

After Effects and Corrective Action

The company moved to clearly define the scope of responsibilities for all employees all the way up to the executive group. Some other directors shifted titles and responsibilities, in addition to Victor finding a more appropriate role. What emerged was a more focused leadership group that was able to effectively lead a growing company without project needs distracting half of the directors.