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Tin of Paint

How much does a coat of paint cost?

We’re in the process of figuring out when to move development back into the studio. The team has been working remotely, like many others, since March 16th 2020.

Working from home has given us many tools; the use of digital stand-ups, keeping a written record of meeting minutes & a more organised holiday schedule among many others. All things, you could argue, should have been in place before a global pandemic.

We’ve had a few different studio setups over the past 9 years of development, and apart from the early days when it was passing initial ideas back over email, meeting in coffee shops and coding from our bedrooms, White Paper has always operated out of Manchester.

So how much does a coat of paint cost?

By this, I mean, how much of your environment fosters the creativity of your team?

We started in a box room. The summers were incredibly warm with all the computers running full whack. The winters were bitterly cold and we even had our share of neighbourhood rats across the years. We didn’t know what we were doing so we almost needed a physical work space to keep everyone relatively in alignment.

We then expanded the studio space to gave ourselves a place to eat. We re-painted the walls, bought IKEA furniture, a couple of couches and, with the help of our friends at SCAN, brought home some of our marketing promo from an EGX event. We still didn’t know what we were doing however we had a larger space to give ourselves room to explore creatively and pin imagery on the wall and have decided meeting areas to share ideas.

We then managed to get extra space in the building next door. The first step was to knock a hole in the wall to connect the spaces. Put up some glass walls for a meeting room and give ourselves room to be creative. We also built a recording studio, and it finally felt like a professional space to host our guests.

But then we didn’t use any of it.

We had our processes and pipelines lined up. We kind of felt like we knew what we were doing this time. And we went fully remote. We’ve kept the project pretty much on track so our planning paid off. And this was in a fully digital environment.

I’m not sure I’d want to begin pre-production in a digital environment but in a heads down creation mode, digital worked out well for us.

In the world of remote work, how much does that cost you to keep? Do you even need to go above and beyond to create an environment that your team may not be using frequently?

As we start to the process of bringing people back to the studio, how much should be fixed, and how much should be remote?

We’ve always built our own computer tables, painted our walls, build our furniture, and tried to create a space to develop in. The space will no doubt look different in another year’s time when we’ve fully fleshed out the space. As the team grows into the next project, it should be a space away from home that we feel comfortable in.

The use of Discord has been great in combination with Slack. It allows us to quickly hope on calls with any configuration of people across teams and with external people. Sending invitations was easy.

This year, more than most, saw the lines blur between holiday and work. Since people couldn’t go anyway, our holiday days excluding our summer & winter studio-wide holidays were incredibly low. We work in 7-week cycles and recently we’ve decided to trial a forced long weekend per person that doesn’t have a holiday schedule that cycle.

I see the studio as more of a base of operations than a place that’s fundamentally needed for creation.

A company isn’t the 4 walls or the desks. There’s no real physical entity which forms a company, a company just is.

But with our team having a shared space to explore ideas and catch up with each other, it’s our safety blanket. With people choosing either a blended approach, fully remote or fully in-house, operations will adapt, but whatever the future, it seems as though the studio will continue to receive a lick of paint after each project and will be a constant member of the team.

Delegate vs Abdicate

The first time you do this, you’ll likely not get it right.

You’re deep in production, you realise you need support, but you haven’t provided enough time for on-boarding.

You hand off the work. Explain it with as much detail as you can. You review the tasks and answer questions but because you don’t believe in micromanaging, you leave them to it.

When you view the work, it’s not anywhere close to where you needed it to be.

You take back the work because you realise you can do it quicker yourself.

This wasn’t delegating, it was abdicating.

You don’t realise the impact this has on that individual and trust will be broken with them at that moment.

In the book constraints there’s a story about an irrigation company, they found that they save water by drip feeding the resource. You need to do this with your delegation. It should be slow and consistent but overtime, can produce better results.

Set up a system of continuous feedback that works for both parties, whether it be daily or weekly, at the start of the week and the end of the week, having a system in place with help with consistency.

Take smaller tasks and build up to larger ones. Give them aspirational goals instead of committed goals to help them hit the flow.

Delegating is a tough skill to get right but knowing the difference between abdicating and delegating will be the starting point to growing a team who trusts one another to do the work without too much oversight which allows you to look for new challenges.

Firefighting

There’s no better work-based feeling when you’re stood behind a coffee bar on a cold winter’s day with a queue out the door, the café full, you’re running out of paper cups, the dishwasher’s broken & the team still need to take their break.

You’re fighting fires constantly. And it’s fun.

You need to plan for the unexpected and it’s your experience and knowledge of the situations that account for it.

There will never be a perfect production unless you’re not aiming high enough and doing exactly what it says on the tin. As with most creative endeavors, the rules aren’t yet written. The path is untrodden ground.

When it comes to production, you should measure what matters and track as many variables you feel creates proper planning.

But there will come a time when you’re running out of time, there’s not enough budget, you still have X features to implement but you can only implement 1/2 X and the responsible team member is moving house and can’t be available.

You need to leave your doors open for this chaos. Plan for it during the day. You don’t know in the morning what is about to catch fire, but you know there’s enough dry material out there that something will.

When these fires inevitably break free, make sure you have a cut off point, a way to kill the oxygen.

Some fires are in high risk areas and need prioritising. Some will burn out if you leave them.

Firefighting can be fun, but install the fire doors. Open them when you’ve completed your 5 HV tasks for the day.

But know when to shut them before they consume you and cause you to burn out. You need the stamina to keep fighting the unknown fires on the horizon rather than wearing yourself thin on the first fire.

All creative projects need that rush and infusion of heat so don’t be too overly cautious when it comes to creativity as to not let spontaneous ideas ignite the team.