My little focus experiment has turned out to be a lot more effective than I initially planned for. It has been so effective that I this week ended up ignoring my new focus area and continued with the one from last week. After being so involved with something for a whole week my mind just wouldn’t let go, and so I decided to just go with it.

I didn’t see the point of working against myself just to stick with an idea, and I am glad I came to that realization. Otherwise I wouldn’t have begun putting the things I worked with last week towards creating a draft of a kind of company wide, agile strategy with an almost flat hierarchy where the whole organization, including management, is using and following the same methods and principles.

My goal is to create a plan for my vision of the ultimate, team driven, agile game development company where the individual is never forgotten and where openness and honesty are the key virtues. Sound a bit too much kumbaya? Well the main challenge of course is to create this kind of open climate and still maintain a strong focus on profitability and effectiveness.

I am borrowing heavily from Agile, Scrum, Lean, XP etc, my focus not being to create THE best methodology but rather to nail down my dream way of working. This is based on my ideals and views on quality, creativity, communication, respect, honesty and focus, among other things.

One of the key goals of this vision is to create a working environment where an individual is never more than one step away from top-level management, in the natural order of communication. This means minimizing the need for dedicated managers and creating a more organic management structure. Managers, possessing one or more key competences, will mainly serve in a more supportive fashion, working alongside self-organizing teams. Instead of managing a single, specific team, managers instead make up their own agile team, each manager in turn serving a number of teams that have use of their particular competences.

In the spirit of a great manager, my aim in the long run is to build an organization where my position will practically be obsolete. Before this is realized though there is a lot that needs to be done. In particular this needs to be field tested in order to work out all the quirks, which hopefully is something I might get the chance to do in the near future.

I’ll just leave it at that for the time being. I don’t want to spoil it by revealing too much in the early stages. Instead I will put my time towards writing all my initial ideas down and start looking at the whole. I might report back with the progress in the future.