Agile AAA Game Project Management I
This 16-hour course offers proven practices for managing large and complex game development projects. The course puts theory into action through extensive use of exercises and a project simulation. Participants gain practical experience working as a product owner, utilizing tools and practices such as the product backlog, release planning and tracking, and sprint planning meetings. Participants leave knowing how to deliver great games without the chaos.
Who is this course for?
- Game Producers & Project Managers
- Studio Heads & Team Leads
What You’ll Learn To Do
- Plan with Agility: Balance creative uncertainty with realistic long-term planning.
- Stay on Budget: Manage scope, costs, and change without sacrificing innovation.
- Prevent Crunch: Build sustainable schedules that protect team health and creativity.
- Work Lean: Streamline art, design, and live ops pipelines for faster, cleaner delivery.
- Scale Seamlessly: Coordinate large or distributed teams, co-dev, and outsourcing.
- Lead with Vision: Align teams around a shared purpose and measurable outcomes.
- Empower Producers: Transform traditional roles into value-driven product ownership.
- Optimize Flow: Apply Kanban to visualize work, eliminate bottlenecks, and accelerate output.
- Adapt at Every Stage: Evolve your process from preproduction through live service.
Topics
- Long-term Project Planning
- How to blend agility and planning across the range of change and uncertainty to manage scope, budget, and cost
- How to manage risk and mitigate it
- Avoiding death marches
- Applying lean practices to content creation and live support
- Scaling practices
- How to apply Scrum to large and distributed teams (including outsourcing)
- Avoiding dependencies
- Actionable techniques for multi-department alignment
- Co-dev, outsourcing, and cross-studio synchronization
- Preproduction vs Production vs Live Support
- Adapting your process based on whether you are exploring (agile preproduction) vs content creation (lean production) or live support (Kanban/DevOps)
- Vision
- How to work with teams to communicate the game’s vision and address the most significant risk: finding the fun.
- Product Ownership
- Adapting existing roles of producer or project manager to the product owner role.
- Product Backlog
- Creation and prioritization
- User stories, Acceptance criteria, and Definitions of Done
- Refining the backlog
- Flow and Feedback
- Lean thinking for fast, low-risk delivery
- Visualizing work and reducing bottlenecks with Kanban
- Reducing prototype iteration loops or optimizing content review cycles
Clinton Keith
Instructor
Clinton Keith, an industry pioneer with over 30 years of game development experience and author of Agile Game Development: Build, Play, Repeat has trained and coached with over 200 game studios.