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What's a big win for production? Obviously shipping a thing on the day we said it was going to go out, but where does that happen?

TL;DRJake Ross says a big win is seeing a process change pay off, such as a new stage-gate progress measure that caught schedule slips earlier, and seeing incremental yearly improvement is why he has stayed.

Jake RossLead Producer

I mean, earlier this week we were actually talking about some of this, because part of what production does too is identify areas of improvement. Okay, this is how the current process is going. Is it working or is it not? If it's working, how can we make it better? If it's not working, let's throw it out and do something new, right? These are the sorts of questions that we ask ourselves. When you introduce something new, a new process, often it takes a quarter or two before you really start to see the effects or fruits of that process change. But to me, a big win on the production side, and the reason I bring it up is because it's fresh, because we were talking about this this week, is when you see the benefits of that process taking effect. You brought up the example of ship trespass earlier. You can correct me if you think I'm wrong here, but the reason why I think we were able to make that call to say, hey, this isn't quite ready, let's push it out, is because we introduced a new process towards the start of the year, at the end of Q1, where we were measuring progress at the various stage gates in a different way. And so we were able to catch changes to schedule earlier on in the process for some of these features, which then allowed us to make calls about whether this is going to be ready in time or not. Sometimes things catch us by surprise, and that's never a good feeling, and as producers it drives us crazy. When things come out of left field and you just weren't prepared for it, nobody told you, they didn't communicate to you, they didn't use your excellent communication management plan that you set up. These are the things that drive us crazy. So we try to set up processes in such a way where we aren't surprised. We mitigate and alleviate the surprises as they come up. And so I think we rolled out a process change towards the beginning of the year that has started to pay dividends. And it wasn't a big thing. It wasn't a gargantuan, massive, huge thing. But it showed that, oh, we actually made something better. We made an incremental change that made the process better. And over the course of almost 10 years now, just to get personal for a second, it's the reason why I've stuck around as long as I have. One of the reasons is because incrementally each year I see the improvements. I see us getting better at this, and there's a lot that's wrapped up into that statement, but at least internally it feels like we ratchet up year after year in terms of how we run things and how we do things internally.

Star Citizen Live›Gamedev: Production Discussion·
Published on this date.7 Jul 2023