Enthusiasm

Yes, 42 new recruits and we have more potentially through referrals.

Now that we have a more active player base, I really need to put some fires under the asses of the officers. Either they need to step up and start organizing events or I need to find new officers. I busted my ass to reignite the fire in HILYMI, they need to make sure to keep the coals red hot and not let them die from lack of attention. I will continue to recruit through the week. My hope is to have around 100 unique members by the end of the week. Some recruits won’t make it, but then again I do know that with the surge of new people, a lot of current members will step out of the darkness. Worst case scenario, I will be able to recruit a few more if we drop below that number.

Thanks to Michael being on board now, I’m feeling amazingly oddly relaxed and most of all I feed like I can focus on the guild for the first time in months.

I actually recruited 10 new recruits for HILYMI today. I tried a slightly new angle on my recruitment method and it seems to be working really well. I actually took the time to promote an officer and come up with a game plan on how to get the guild running back at full steam again. I’m absolutely amazed, I dunno, it just feels like magically things are just going really well. 

I think I might need to make some revisions to the HILYMI website. It seems enough people are getting confused with the forums that it might warrant some updates to the skin. Not really a big deal, just something needing to be look into. I also need to start producing some guild videos as well as updating the guild gallery. Maybe I can find the time this weekend to do some of that. 

Tonight we had 12 people online at one point. I really would love to see the guild over 20 online again. Once we start hitting over 20 consistently, every night, then I know we’re at a healthy guild number. It seems like a healthy number of about 20-25 will keep the guild from ever complaining that there’s “nothing” to do. We might certainly get close to 80 unique members with 40 or so alts, putting the guild around 120 characters. Of course the most I’ve managed in unique members was around 120. If we ever get that big again, I’ll have to make sure I have solid officers first. If we had that many we’d be able to fill over half a war band and probably a full war band on most nights. Of course regular PVE runs would be a given for sure. I think we can’t do it just with recruitment though. We need to focus on scheduling events.

Back in January, I discussed with the team that we have a duty to define the scope of what we need to accomplish. I beat this drum and beat this drum and no one was really paying attention. I continued to beat it up to and including the environmental summit last week. Still we didn’t have a complete vision of what we wanted to accomplish. Monday I came in ready to define that.

Tim asked me to develop a slide deck talking about architecture as well as some details about how we can intersect data. Finally I was getting my chance to communicate the vision that I’ve been trying to communicate for the last two months. To add fuel to the ugency fire, on top of it, we were hoping to have a good presentation in response to some things written by a stock analyst who we are presenting to next week. What this guy was proposing is what we’ve been collectively saying for some time, which is we need one unified product for the Environment. 

So I got to work. Monday I drew up an architecture document and Tuesday night I wrote a 9 page architecture document. Today I’ve been busy communicating with everyone from individuals on the team to Don, Mark, Brian, everyone who would listen to get their buy-in on the vision. I think I have a sound group of people supporting the vision and Tim seems to like what I’ve come up with as well. Today we made some more refinements to the documentation including input from Michael.

Now that we have defined the scope of what we hope to accomplish. Now it’s up to Tim and Andrew to discuss it with their higher ups and get buy-in. Maybe they like it. Maybe they think we’re crazy. All I know is that our duty to define the scope of what we need to accomplish is done. Now it’s up to them to define when and who will do the work. If given the green light, then we have the exciting challenge to figure out how we’re going to make it happen (along with everything else on our respective plates).

Today’s focus was resource allocation, resource allocation, and resource allocation. We really went outside the box on how we could move things around, how we could reorganize efforts to accelerate things, how all these new initiatives gave us opportunities and challenges, and how (as Andrew put it) we needed to “Do the impossible”. Well I never thing anything is impossible, just highly improbable. We need to change the game being played to make the odds better suited to making the impossible the most likely outcome. We got the resource allocations written down, but unfortunately we still don’t have a full game plan yet.

When we were talking about the BIGGER picture of a unified architecture, I got REALLY pissy with Brian and went overboard on how I communicated TO him how things needed to happen. I’m just frustrated with his point of view that we need a WHOLE new team to re-write everything from the ground up. It’s not reality. It’s not going to happen. I need to figure out a constructive and non-abrasive approach to communicating a different vision of how we get from 3 separate products onto one single consolidated platform. Ironically, the vision isn’t even my vision. It’s someone else’s vision and I am just acting like the champion of the vision, tyring to get people’s buy-in. I’ve communicated it before, but people don’t get it. How can I communicate this vision better? Meh, I’ll try not to think about it over the weekend. Maybe I’ll have an epiphany on Monday.

We started right where we left off yesterday on continuing the architectural discussion on this new product in our space. When expanding upon it we talked more about possible time lines, skill sets, and how we could deliver the product quickly. Much of it sounded like there was VERY technical skill sets needed but not many to get the job done. The hard part sounded like we had to leverage ecoAsset business knowledge and business logic code and what kind of ramifications that had toward the architecture and time lines ecoAsset has on its plane. We brought up some other supporting technologies for feeding data in and out from ecoAsset to and from this new supporting product. We also talked about programs like RGGI for example and how that may or may not affect both products.

As always when you have tons of people gettting tons of work done, hours turn into minutes and dinner approached again. Many people couldn’t make it today but Randy, Andrew, and myself enjoyed dinner at the famous Salvador Molly’s. We talked a lot about HARD questions that Andrew’s been probably dying to ask and again he took advantage of the moment and asked for my “no bullshit” and strait to the point kind of answers I love to give him. Talked about a lot of things regarding overall architecture and how we can support domain level initiatives and what roadblocks are in the way of making that happen. Focused the rest of the evening on getting to know Randy and Andrew even better. Unfortunately Kerrie couldn’t make it due to timing although she was invited. Tomorrow is the last day of the summit and there’s much more work to be done. We’ll see what happens.

Today’s focus was on something that honestly I shouldn’t even be talking about vaguely. Let’s just say it’s a new product that focuses on some high level functionality in the domain. We talked about the supporting technologies and what business partners we would ally with to make that happen. About half way through the day we broke up into a technical discussion on arhcitecture and a business focused discussion for the business type folks. The architecture discussion obviously was very technical and we discussed different architectual approaches on how we could build this RIGHT while also delivering it to market very quickly. We developed a very rough overview before recapping some of the goals we needed to achieve before the end of the week from the technical side.

Again hours felt like they flew by in minutes and before we knew it we were heading out to dinner again. This time we decided to hit Henry’s downtown since it was St. Patty’s Day. We did a fair amount of drinking and we tried to focus on team building, getting to know each other better, and celebrating a successful summit (the main summit was the first 2 days, the technical folks are the one’s who are focused the rest of the week). Got to hear a lot of stories, good juicy ones from Tim Dore about the old days, Don, Pre-Dolphin, and Dolphin. Got to spend a good bit of time with Jim Wilmsen which was fantastic getting to know him and letting him get to know me.

Once I had enough beer (liquid courage / stupidity) I also prodded Andrew a bit about his comments at the end of the work day yesterday. He told me about how Kim Brown had mentioned my name as a possible asset for Project Management because I have those skills. Apprently she made this comment as recently as 2-3 months ago. I was kinda shocked by this because I had assumed that I had fallen completely off her radar. Need to noodle on that one for a while…

On our way out, talked with Michael a bit about TFS and his comments / excitement about TFS. I’m glad to have another ally helping push good, proper, agile use of that tool. He has great Agile development experience and can help lay appropriate guidelines to making it happen. He also threw me a bone as to my role on the new project coming down the pipe. It was mentioned that I might be doing something similar in contribution to that project than what I’ve been doing on ecoAsset. Does that mean development management or project management? Does this support Andrew’s comments about Project Management? Hmmmm… we’ll see.

So the big event has come. Many people were here, more than I expected and much more people that I didn’t know already including a gentleman from Global Insight, Ira Herenstein. The event opened up with some really big visionary statements by Mark Wysong that set the tone for the week. Over the next few days I will keep my thoughts relatively generic because I’m sure we want to keep much of what was discussed under corporate wraps (I’ll just stick to my thoughts and personal “gotchas” for mental keepsake). Meeting people is fun and even more so getting to talk with some people that I’ve only met once back at the ESP user conference. On in particular gave me some compliments on how well I’ve turned ecoAsset around and gotten the thing from disorganized to highly organized and on track. I learned more about REACH and it’s requirements as it comes to the CLM side of the business. I had only had brief understand of it before, but now I see why it’s such a big deal learning more about it.

About half way through the day I met Michael Lehane who not only met but exceeded my expectations in enthusiasm and results orientation. I gave him a drink from the fire hose because he needed to be prepared for the discussion tomorrow. Hours flew by in what felt like minutes and before I knew it, I was being pulled into a meeting with Andrew and my other colleagues. We talked more about resource allocation and Andrew made comments about how Brian might be pulled to be the head of Environment wide UI development and not just focused on Eco and then he joked “Heck and Victor could be pulled into Project Management” or something to that effect. I was a bit shocked by his comment since I was only now starting to feel comfortable in my current role. We had dinner and talked more about many things related to architecture and vision. Tomorrow is going to be interesting and really will set the pace of the rest of the week for my product line anyhow.

It has been a LONG time since I played paintball. I was looking forward to it because my brother had given me his old (but good) paintball gun which I was looking forward to using this evening. Unfortunately after John looked at the gun, it needs a little bit more equipment and I need to get my own O2 tank and other supporting equipment like I dunno… A FRICKIN HOPPER. Well anyhow, we had a good time. Shot through almost half a case of paint and played for around 3-4 hours. My legs are killing me, my welts are sore, but overall we had a fantastic time. Other than one particular instance of getting LIT up by balls at the start of a match, I was pretty consistent in only getting shot in the head (which as they say, that means I’m doing it right). Was glad to meet South’s friends and would be happy to hang out with them again. It would be good to expand my extended network of friends outside online gaming.

1 director / coder, 2 additional coders, 1 story writer, 2 artists, 1 musician, and 4 testers / contributors

Sent out a big email today to everyone who has shown interest in being part of the game. Of all the people I hope is still onboard is DaveUK, the musician. He was on board before and helped write a few pieces of music and I think is a must have. I did some research today on XBox Live to see what kind of competition we have out there for inde JRPG games and there was nothing. In fact the whole Role Playing category is empty beside a side scroller action RPG and a game which is an all out scam. Hopefully we can develop this thing in our spare time and make some decent cash off of it. Talked with Robin, the story writer and we talked about putting up a project website somewhere to ensure continuous collaboration on the project. At some point too, I need to figure out how we’re going to break up the ownership of the IP, whether we all will own it or just Kerrie and I will under an assumed publishing company and then pay the team appropriately if/when we make money. I’m not really sure how it will go down, but it’s things to think of up front to make sure that we’re protected if this thing takes off.

Jersey shore, lighthouse, tradition, huge Philly airport, nice flight to MSP, nice Minniapolis airport, long flight to Portland, XNA brainstorming, drunk / meth head on the plane, getting home thanks to Dad, resting.