In Need of Team Tips

[infel]

So I've been struggling with keeping a team together. I was wondering if anyone has tips about how to do so, like should I make a schedule and if yes how?. Any tips or advice would be great =).

[sorani]

Making a schedule is good. Or making everyone get on on certain days to report their progress is good, too.
Really if they're avoiding their work and not making time to work with you then I say they're not really doing their work.
Livestreams is also pretty good for the artist and you to come up with ideas while be productive and keeping the team together and motivated imo.
That's about it I can suggest.
Keeping a team together and motivated is hard :/

[firecat]

let everyone join a website or build a forum to keep updates. i recommend slack.com for collaboration, even if you not using it for sharing videos or storys it can still be a good place to hang out and talk.

[MegaElla]

You can also use Google drive, I worked with a few projects there, but for communication we had a group on skype where we had once in a while we talked and came up with ideas or so. If not you can always use the forums to see what's up with them and ask them their time zone and when they're available.

[infel]

Thank you guys for all the tips. I think they'll help me keep things in order. I just don't have the best luck with teams for some reason =(.

[trooper6]

If you are having regular trouble keeps no a team together, I'd recommend doing an After Action Report on each of your team meltdowns.

What caused the problems?
Did you not have accountability mechanisms?
What did you do or not do to contribute to the team's failure?
What did the other team members do or not do to contribute to the team's failure?

When did the problems arise and what might that teach you?
Did it happen in the beginning of the process? Near the end? In the middle?

What patterns can you discern that might help you do better?

I say this because what you might need to do to have a better team experience might be different than what someone else might need to do to have a better team experience.

A team leader who is passive aggressive will need different tips than a team leader whose problem is rooted in a poor vetting process for picking team mates. A team leader who is dictatorial will need different tips than a team leader who is too passive. A team leader who tries to form teams too early needs different tips than a team leader who does things too late.

So...do a good AAR and see what insight that might give you.

[RotGtIE]

A couple of things to remember.

These sorts of collaborations are very much a voluntary thing. Even if you're paying someone for commissioned assets, you're nobody's boss, and anyone can bail anytime they are no longer interested in the project. In planning and taking action to keep your project afloat, you must always remember this constant - their motivation, not yours, is the primary deciding factor in whether they stay on board or not.

Within the scope of that understanding, there are many things you can do to minimize the likelihood of people dropping off. These are a few:

Always Be Producing
I cannot stress enough that if you are the project lead - even if you didn't really want to be - you must always be doing something productive. If you are the lead writer, you have to keep writing at a consistent pace, and even when you are done with the prose of the story itself, you have to be heavily involved in planning, directing, and coordination. If you are the project lead but you are not the lead writer, you still have to keep producing everything you can to show the rest of the team that you are on track and that you are going to support their efforts with your own every step of the way. For example, if you're the illustrator and project lead, you can always support your writer with sketches or 4komas to help them get a better handle on the characters and setting you're having them write scenes about. If you're the composer and project lead, then producing your soundtrack will help get your other team members in the right atmosphere for their own work. Even if everything you create doesn't visibly make it into the final product, every little bit of effort counts, and teams like to see that their leader is putting in the most effort out of all of them - it keeps them motivated and wanting to "keep up" with your efforts.

Plan Ahead
Map out absolutely, positively everything you possibly can, preferably before bringing asset-producing team members on board. IRC bullshitting and Ideas Guys are fine for the initial Ideas phase, but at some point, and by "some point" I mean "sooner rather than later" you are going to have to outline clear and precise plans for how your project will progress. Even if you're not a writer, you need to build an outline for your story which is preferably specific enough that you will have every scene mapped out so that your writer should only have to start putting down prose. Even if you're not an illustrator, you should familiarize yourself with character design elements and go dig up a ton of reference images for everything you think you will possibly need. Even if you're not a composer, figure out how to describe certain genres of music and familiarize yourself with the various instruments used within them so that you can speak competently to the subject and coordinate with the person who is making the music.

And for the love of all that is good, build yourself a set of planning documents which clearly outline exactly what assets will be needed. Get used to putting together spreadsheets and screenplays. It's dull work, but it's best done sooner rather than later, especially before commissioning any assets or requesting them from a volunteer. Measure twice, cut once is a very applicable statement here.

Cut Your Losses Early
Planning allows you to do this effectively. You will never know with sufficient certainty just how reliable someone is until you actually start working with them. If you plan your project needs out ahead of time, you can keep your newer or prospective team members on the periphery until you can actually get them to do something, then bring them in to the core team once they demonstrate their utility and reliability. It's much, much better to be able to cut someone from the team before they produce any assets than after, for obvious reasons. With proper planning, you can make early cuts if people aren't keeping up communication with you very well or if you aren't able to establish terms that everyone is comfortable with. You want that to happen sooner rather than later, and you have to be ready for it to happen, because...

You Cannot Make People Productive if They Don't Want to Be
You shouldn't be trying to fix anyone who has poor work ethic or is bad with communication, and you shouldn't be trying to reach them more than halfway. There are other people out there who will work with you in a professional manner - the best thing to do is quickly let go of people who are not demonstrating reliability so that you can move on to filling their position with someone who will fulfill the needs of the project. This is not personal, and while it's never fun, doing it doesn't make you a bad person. It's just a necessity. You need to keep your team lean and on track, and if you're already doing everything you can within your own power and someone on the team is taking up space that could be better filled by someone who keeps the kind of schedule you need, then they are holding back the project and you need to correct that, because just like all the other work you are doing, staff management is part of your job as the project lead. Your other team members are also counting on you to do this so that their efforts aren't held back either. It's not just an unpleasant chore - it's a responsibility.

[sasquatchii]

A question everyone people usually ask themselves when working on visual-novel related teams is usually "Should we work together?"

I think the better questions to ask would be:

"Do we want to work together?"
"Are we all excited to be a part of this project?"
"Do we like each other?"
"Can we all get along and keep pushing ourselves even after the initial excitement is gone?"

Leading a team is really hard. I work with a team of people at my job as a designer, and, as an introvert and pacifist, sometimes it's downright exhausting. Collaborating with others requires a lot of give and take. You also really have to learn how to pick your battles. If you're constantly trying to get everyone to do things exactly your way, your team will really hate you. There will be times when you disagree with others, but sometimes it's better to just go with the flow. There are other times when you're really going to need to sway others to your way of thinking. Everyone should be able to trust each other to make autonomous decisions without one person trying to micromanage everything.

I lucked out with my Buzz VNP co-hosts Mikey & Kuiper. In both cases, they approached me & asked to become involved with the project. With that level of moxie, how could I say no?! Those are the kinds of people you want on your team, the people who take initiative and aren't afraid to ask to get involved.

I think our team really works well because we all are so interested & excited about what we're talking about, and everyone challenges each other to think about things in new ways or consider things they hadn't thought of before. When we first started the podcast, it went in a completely different direction than I thought it would, but that more than okay because the end result was something we were really proud of and all felt ownership over.

I think another really important thing is to be open minded and easy going. Don't say no to people or shoot down their ideas or work. If you disagree with someone, instead of challenging them, dig deeper to learn more about the why. Ask questions. You may be surprised at what you learn, and even more surprised if you find yourself agreeing with them. You guys might also end up creating a solution that is even better than what you'd both wanted before.

I would say as a newbie to leading teams and creating visual novels, it's important to start small and work your way up. Even a five minute visual novel can take weeks or months to make, and it's really helpful to get a feel for these things before starting larger projects that might take months and years.

It also helps to finish something on your own (even if it's less than perfect) to show people you can! I think this really inspires trust and helps to illustrate that you're commited to your work.

[ketskari]

You might have some more luck if you make a portfolio or more samples available. Summaries are a poor way to tell how a finished story is going to look, and you're more likely to attract reliable or more invested team members if they can look at your other VNs, long excerpts, short stories, twines or other projects to see what they're getting into. You might even attract artists or other team members who have common interests or are even fans of your work, which is better. As a bonus, it tells them that you're reliable and can finish things, too.

No guarantees, of course, but it always baffles me how few writers post their own samples, but nearly every artist here has a dA.

[Kailoto]

Don't be afraid to be a hardass. It sounds harsh, but sometimes in projects you can't be everyone's friend. Sometimes you have to actually step in and reprimand people when they don't do their work, or pester people when they fail to communicate. If you always try to be on their good side and are constantly holding back, they'll use the extra room you give them. It doesn't mean that they're bad people, but you're indirectly endorsing their bad habits if you don't strighten them out.

And if that's not your personality type... well, just work on it a little at a time. Try to be a little more assertive, a little more confident, and a little more unforgiving. Some discipline is better than none.

Other tips? Set up regular, mandatory meetings or progress reports. Communication is key, and when it crumbles, it's a sign that productivity is going downhill fast. Lock your artist/writer/composer into a constant cycle of updates, so that when they miss out on a week, you have something concrete for them to improve upon. It's the best accountability measure available, especially over the internet.