How much time is spent on average by individual functional personnel (non-producers/project managers) providing content for all these regular updates? How do you all prevent "status updates" from interfering with personnel doing their jobs? Most of the status content we're seeing looks like it takes a while to put together and that it would really get in the way of actually creating the universe. As such when I stop seeing something like Around the Verse's "Ship Shape" during a given week or several weeks straight I'm assuming the personnel are refocusing on actually getting the ships out. Accurate or are those folks on vacation?asked by Drewcifer

Your assumption is correct: they all go on holiday until the camera rolls really!

[chuckles]

No, they don't. They do, in fact, get back to work on their respective pipelines. It certainly can be a big distraction. Not that we don't love spending a lot of time with Thomas here, or writing letters for the community. It's an important thing though. So the community updates that we do, they're written as a partnership between the senior production staff, the developer leads that they work with closely, and the Community team.The senior producers are in a position to have a big picture view of the project. Which makes them uniquely suited to write this kind of report. One mantra of Production is "protect your team" and that's protect your team from distractions; protect your team from things that keep them doing their job. So a good producer will take this to heart and keep the impact of these kind of reports to a minimum. Try to keep it to no more than a few minutes per developer per week on these kind of reports.It's the collating of the report, and the gathering of the necessary materials, the writing it down and editing it that really takes the time. I've personally spent: the worst was probably a day and a half total, spread out over a few days, writing some of the bigger Star Marine reports that I was working on. But I would say that the average time for me has worked out at less than four hours a week. That's a chunk of time but if I worked a forty hour week, which would be awesome, it's less than ten percent of my time. So I would say the average time is not that great.

And it's important for a producer to know what his or her team is working on at any given point. So we have weekly scrums here, we have leads meetings, we have just the day-to-day interaction with developers. At any point I know what my team is working on at any given time. So making these reports, I know you do the Star Marine reports, and I'll chip in on the monthly report you guys see; but with any of these reports it's easy for the producer to take that information from his head and put it on paper because he already just knows what his team is working on. In some instances it's not the case and you actually have to reach out and get detailed updates for things you don't have the information on. But for the most part you should be able to pull a lot of that information from your head already. So the important thing is, like you said, to protect your team from that time and a good way to do that is just to pull it from your own head.

I should point out we're not doing the Star Marine reports any more. Our focus has shifted so that it's specifically a report on the progress of 2.0 and ultimately that will be a report on our Star Citizen releases in general. I've been partnering with Tom Johnson in Manchester on those reports now, so we're splitting the burden which makes it both easier and harder for both of us.The other thing I wanted to point out is that developers like Zane Bien working on the User Interface or Mark Abent who does the Bugsmasher, those guys obviously spend more time but I think those are important updates. The communication with our backers, with you guys, and getting that feedback from the community really keeps the team going and allows us to make course corrections where we need to. It's great and it's almost a unique situation in the industry.