Are you ready to conquer the ever changing market of modern technology with your excellent management skills?

Transcription

1 Welcome to the GoToIT! Are you ready to conquer the ever changing market of modern technology with your excellent management skills? Let s go then! Character creation So, it s year IT market has started to blossom but is still an uncharted territory. You started your company, hoping to find and establish your niche. The first thing you ll most likely want to do is to hire more employees and to finally start to work on projects. What should I do if I don't get resumes and project offers? Don't have enough money? Take a loan! Project life cycle Employee management Market analysis

2 Character Creation 1. Gender. Has no gameplay impact :) 2. Name. What s your character called? 3. Background. Your past. How did you get into IT and what benefits can you get from it? a. Technologist. i. You ve worked in the industry for quite some time. You ve had some experience working in other companies, and now you re inspired to start your own. ii. Bonus: Rapid Development. b. Startup founder. i. You ve just finished your education or your courses? Doesn t matter! What matters is that you re full of enthusiasm and managed to befriend a partner during your education! ii. Bonus: Additional employee with low salary expectancy. c. Businessman. i. You ve been doing business for a while and you know that it d be great to get into IT market. It s a gold mine! ii. Bonus: Good credit score. 4. Secondary bonus. You get one starting bonus from your background, and you also get to pick one additional bonus. a. Technologist. i. Designer: +3 design skill, Sketchbook, Tablet. ii. Programmer: +3 programming skill, IDE, Laptop. iii. Manager: +3 management skill, Phone, Bug Tracker. b. Startup founder. i. Pair Programming. ii. 2nd additional employee. iii. Motivation. c. Businessman. i. + $ cash. ii. Micromanagement. iii. +4 management skill.

3 Technologist Startup Founder Businessman Designer: +3 design skill `Sketchbook` item `Tablet` item Programmer: +3 programming skill `IDE` item `Laptop` item Manager: +3 management skill `Phone` item `Bugtracker` item Pair Programming. 2nd additional employee Motivation. + $ cash. Micromanagement. +4 management skill.

4 Mail You get 4 kinds of mail: 1. Resume This is your way of hiring new employees. Skills, salary, personal qualities of potential employee are specified here, as well as and time during which this resume will be available. Press the Accept button to hire the employee or Reject to reject them. 2. Project offers This mail will tell you about company willing to make an offer, salary that you ll get in case of your success, time limits of development and skills needed to do it. 3. Events Historical events that happen during the course of the game. Some of them impact the gameplay. 4. Project reports Successful project reports show: 1) How many hours had passed and how many were still available. 2) Whether or not the project was successful. 3) Which members of your team worked on the project. 4) How many tasks have been done. 5) How many bugs have been resolved. 6) Complexity of the project. 7) Number of iterations. 8) Project ranking.

5 Projects Your own project When starting your own project you get to pick: 1) The name of the project. 2) Platform. Note that new platforms become available throughout the game after certain historical events happen (you ll get notifications via mail ). Different platforms require focus on different skills. 3) Type. Different project types require focus on different skills 4) Employees you wish to assign to work on the project. Project life cycle Unlike offered projects, your own projects don t have a deadline and will be released when you like. Your income is also calculated differently, and depends on project ranking. There is a base rate that gets further multiplied by additional factors. 1) Ratio or used technical skills checks against requirements of chosen platform and type of the projects. The closer ratio of design-program-manage to the requirements - the larger is base rate. 2) Each of the four rankings checks if the project is in it s top 10. Project on the first place earns twice as much as 2nd project, 2nd project earns twice as much as the 3rd and so on. Minimal requirement is 10th place, 11th doesn t earn additional income. Furthermore, Main rating reward gets x3 multiplier. Platform rating reward gets x2 multiplier. Type rating reward gets x2 multiplier. Platform+type rating reward is not multiplied. 3) Rewards of all 4 ratings get summed up to form final project income.

6 Offered projects You get various project offers from various companies via mail. To accept an offer click Accept button. If you manage to finish a project on time you ll get paid an amount of money that was specified in mail. If you won t finish a project before it s deadline, project will be considered a failure and you won t get paid.

7 Header information On the top of your screen you can see: 1) How much money do you have. 2) State of the office. Possible options: a) Work time. b) Free time (sleeping). c) Weekends. 3) Current date and time. 4) Three speed options and pause. 5) Skip a day button.

8 Employee technical qualities Every employee has a set of skills: design, programming and management. Those whose skills are developed more evenly like to learn more and are more effective in tasks like refactoring. In turn, those who are more specialized in one thing are more willing to work. Thus, employees with a defined specialization are more motivated to work, but if you make them learn they ll get more unhappy. If you want to improve qualification of an employee and have him learn skills that you need, you ll want to pick those who are more willing to learn.

9 Employee character qualities Types of character: 1) Normal. Doesn t have any unusual features. 2) Modest. Rarely demands a raise, but a slow learner. 3) Workaholic. Dedicates more time to work, but demands a raise more often. Workaholics like to come to work earlier than others. 4) Wonk. Loves to learn, but often gets distracted. 5) Gifted. Great learning rate, but doesn t like to learn. Night owl/early bird: Some employees are prone to getting up early/late. Additionally, a coffee maker will encourage you employees to come to work earlier and lunches will make them stay longer. Consistency in time of coming to work can also vary.

10 Reputation and rumors There are Reputation and Rumor scales, you can find them in Public Relations. 1) Rumors Rumors will make it easier for new candidates to find your company, thus you ll get more resumes. Every time rumor scale reaches maximum you ll get a new resume. 2) Reputation Increasing reputation will allow you to get more job offers via mail. Every time reputation scale reaches maximum you ll get a new project offer. On the Public Relations page there are several options: 1. Start a forum thread. (free!) During 1 game day slightly increases rumors and to a greater degree - reputation. 2. Search market for a specialist. During 1 week greatly increases rumors. 3. Search market for a job. During 1 week greatly increases reputation. 4. Attend a big event. During 2 weeks increases rumors and reputation. Combination of multiple similar options will improve their effect.

11 Project life cycle Work on a project begins the moment you press Start button. A project can always be Paused or Rejected altogether. Iterations: Projects are done in iterations: 1) All tasks are being processed. 2) Some tasks become completed while some are turned into bugs. 3) Bugs become tasks again. Probability of getting new bugs is lesser than on previous iteration. Tasks: A task is a single unit of job for an employee to do. Number of completed tasks / Number of overall tasks. Bugs: During development your team sometimes gives birth to bugs.??? Complexity: Represents difficulty of a project. Difficulty of a project increases bug ratio. Below are displayed task scales on each technical field (design, programming, management). You can pick which member of a team will focus on which field via corresponding checkboxes. Development of a project is also influenced by development methodologies, represented by a list of checkboxes. When a project is finished it gets a place in rankings.

12 Project ranking Every finished project gets its place in the rankings. There are a total of 4 rankings: 1) Main, which includes all existing finished projects. 2) Platform. Which place does a project get among projects with the same platform. 3) Type. Which place does a project get among projects with the same type. 4) Which place does a project get among projects with the same platform AND type. How does a project get into TOP? Each ranking also divides into subrankins of design/program/management. I.e. how much resources were spent on a certain technical part of the project. Of course, if a project didn t have, for example, any programming in it, it will get a bottom place in program ranking.

13 Employee management If you want to see how a certain employee is doing, press the Manage button next to his avatar. There you can see and change their salary, how are they feeling, their work statistics, and which items do they have. Stamina When an employee is out of stamina - they need a vacation. The lower their stamina - the lower their productivity. Stamina decreases when an employee is working. If during work time employee doesn t do anything, it decreases twice as slow. [Hackathons decrease stamina faster than regular work.]? Stamina increases when an employee is on vacation. Salary raise replenish 10% of stamina. Happiness Happiness impacts productivity twice as much as stamina. Happiness depends on several factors: 1) Team. Big disсrepancy in skill level negatively impacts workers. If there is one newbie among professional developers - he (she) will be far more miserable than the rest. Vice versa, if a skilled developer gets into a newbie team - he (she) will be unhappy. 2) If employees don t get paid on time, their happiness rapidly decreases by 50%. 3) After a salary raise, employee gets happiness boost for a few weeks. 4) If an employee earns more than an average specialist with his (her) level of skills - he (she) is happier. 5) Proper office management positively impacts happiness. 6) Difficulty of work. If the work is so difficult that an employee can t stop producing bug after bug - they are upset. On the other hand, if they don t produce any bugs at all, it means that they are doing what they already perfected, and get upset too. 7) Amount of work. Sometimes it s a good idea to let an employee do nothing.endlessly jumping from project to project makes them unhappy.

14 Salary Salary is paid automatically every month. If you don t have enough money, salary payment doesn t occur. Payment algorithm goes like this: 1) Employees get sorted by their salary, from lowest to highest. 2) Salary gets paid one by one. 3) If at some point you run out of money, this process stops. The rest of your employees don t get salary If you didn t pay on time you can: 1) Just skip this month and pay salary next time. 2) Pay them as soon as you have money. To do that, you should navigate to each employee you owe money personal window, and click a Pay a debt button. Vacation In order to replenish worker s stamina, you can propose a vacation. Vacation lasts 2 weeks, and during that time employee gets back 20% stamina. Employees will leave on vacation on their own when their stamina reaches 10%. To send an employee on vacation, navigate to their personal window with Manage button and press Propose vacation. To check whether or not they are going to leave on their own, open their window with Manage and carefully read text description. If it doesn t say anything about vacation - they are not going anywhere. When an employee is in office, he (she) is not working, but he (she) needs to get paid as usual. Raise You can raise employee s salary in their personal window by pressing +10% button. Fire You can fire and employee in their personal window by pressing Dismiss an employee button.

15 If an employee is extremely unhappy, they will leave on their own. When his (her) happiness drops to 50%, they start to think about it. The more their happiness drops the more is the chance that they will leave. However, if you pay them more than average salary, they ll be unlikely to leave. At the same time, highly skilled worker will quickly abandon you and leave to another company. Description details In employee s text description you can find information about: 1) Overall satisfaction with the job. 2) Satisfaction with quantity of tasks. 3) Satisfaction with complexity of tasks. 4) Satisfaction with time spent on learning. 5) How comfortable they are in the team. 6) Whether or not they need a vacation. Personal statistics Instrumentary In employee s personal window there s page with their items. Items give passive bonuses to their work and learning. 1) Design items: A. Sketchbook. Increases experience gain by 10%. B. Tablet. Adds flat 10 bonus to design skill. C. 4K Monitor. Adds 10% bonus to design skill. 2) Programming items: A. IDE. Increases experience gain by 10%. B. Laptop. Adds flat 10 bonus to programming skill. C. CI Server. Adds 10% bonus to programming skill. 3) Management items: A. Phone. Increases experience gain by 10%. B. Bug tracker. Adds flat 10 bonus to management skill. C. ERP System. Adds 10% bonus to management skill.

16 Office Office allows you to have more employees in your team but requires monthly upkeep. If you start a game with only 1 employee (yourself), you start without an office. 1) Sweet home. It s your house! You can t invite additional employees here, but you don t have to pay an upkeep. 2) Garage startup. Now you can hire 3 additional employees. Monthly upkeep is $500. In order to upgrade your office to a Garage startup you simply press a Rent an office button. 3) Busy header. Can house 7 people. Monthly upkeep is $2500. In order to upgrade to Busy header, you must first hire 4 employees and then press an Extend the office button. 4) ААА Studio. Can house up to 10 employees. Monthly upkeep is $ If you want to save some money, you can downgrade your office by pressing Downgrade the office. You can only do so if your team is small enough to fit in new office.

17 Development methodologies 1. Overtime Employees work more but get tired much faster. They can work at night, on weekends, overtime. They won t be able to keep this up longer than a few weeks and will need good rest afterwards. 2. Creativity Every fifth hour of work employees will spend on learning. They also learn more effectively during work. 3. Micromanagement Allows to bypass individual level of happiness of each worker. Instead, average level of happiness in company is used for all employees. If a project complexity fits team skills, this methodology will let you finish a project faster. Otherwise it ll just spawn a lot of bugs. 4. Test Drive Development Project team writes a lot of tests, which significantly decreases number of bugs. Writing tests however require spending some work time on them. Periodically, employees stop doing their tasks and do tests instead. Tests are done for each task. It allows to greatly decrease number of bugs and thus - number of iterations. Note that this is double-edged sword: employees will get less experience when working on a project with enabled TDD. 5. Motivation The boss (your character) spends half of their time on motivation of employees. It allows to artificially increase their level of happiness

18 during work time. However their actual level of happiness doesn t change, they just work better. 6. Rapid Development Allows to increase the speed of development by 2 times at the cost of increasing complexity. Complexity gets squared. 7. Refactoring Decreases complexity of a project, but slows down development. Complexity appears as a new type of tasks, which employees periodically do. 8. Pair Programming Employees work less but do more tasks and produce less bugs. Well, ideally. Workers get paired up and do tasks together. Imagine that it s a design tasks. If a designer gets paired up with an employee with low design skill, the effective bonus will be negligible, and they d be more effective working alone. However, if both of them have decent design skill, development effectiveness greatly increases. So you need to use this methodology wisely.

19 Market Analysis Display current market situation, current TOP 10 projects (from the best ones on the left to the less successful ones on the right). You can sort it by platform and project type.

20 Loans On the credit tab you can take 3 different loans: 1) Small loan. 2) Medium loan. 3) Large loan. Your credit score increases as you pay your loans on time, allowing you to take more and bigger loans. The earlier you pay your loan the more credit score you get. If you have many loans your credit score decreases. When you take a loan, you also have to pay an interest - a certain percentage of loan amount. You can manually pay them back on loan tab, or they can be paid automatically during the course of specified time (3 months for a small loan, 6 months for a medium one and 12 months for a large loan). Every month you pay a loan amount divided by number of months.

21 Exchange In company shares will be available to buy. Share cost will depend on corresponding company success. In time you ll get an opportunity to invest in cryptocurrency. Bitcoin will become available in 2009.

22 Timeline