Part 3 is a walkthrough of generating a Risk and Issue Log that you can download and use/abuse at your leisure. The YouTube runthrough is here:
Here's the links to those files as promised: Excel https://1drv.ms/x/s!Aqnki7UtWwaHrWlhL...
Google Sheets https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/...
Part 1, a more general introduction around risk management in the game industry, can be found here: https://youtu.be/Mh_WsEYr8WY
Part 2 goes into more detail on actual risk and issue examples. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1d9CS...
Here is the complete transcript.
Risk Management Walkthrough
Main Speaker: Hello. I promised you that you would get a walkthrough of risks and issues and see some actual examples of them being entered, et cetera. So, what I'm going to do is exactly that I've got some examples here for you, and we can talk about some of this and just wanted to show you some of the different ways you can do it. So, let's get started. You'll know I'm using Excel, but you don't have to, you could use sheets, you could use all sorts to do this. All you need are rows and columns. You can make it as clever and colorful as you like. I'll make these templates available to you afterwards, so you can download and use if you wish. And I think I'll probably put them in Google sheets, as well as in Excel. Take what you like. Now, what you see here is an absolute classic example. And I say it's a classic example because this was when I was actually using myself. I inherited this, we were using this at one of the studios and you can see that on the left, you say, okay, so risk and issue. So, for example and these are just made up rail gun feature. So, let's say we're trying to coat a rail gun. We're not sure what we can but the designers are changing some content sorry, changing the design. So, they're feeling more confident. We've got a coder looking into it, which is the proposed action. So, the action taken so far is design change to remove the main technical risks so we are optimistic. And you can see they're moving from left to right we've got the risk and issue listed. We've got the impact, which in this case could be anything from very high to high to ongoing, which was a kind of meant to say, this is a very long-term thing. It's going to affect us for the whole time we're making the game, et cetera, et cetera. And it could have huge impacts, but rather than just saying, it's a bang, very high. It's like no this is something that's going to need a lot of looking into and checking. Category so game wide issue, art, design, code, audio, et cetera, QA just, that was one way of categorizing. Proposed action, so in this case, it was like, we could do this.
So, if you look down there you've got staffing need to hire people to fill out a resource profile, or we cannot ramp up in time. That meaning say you've going from concept and you've been told to go to, into preproduction, have a big team built behind you. Maybe you're making a mobile game and you've been given the go ahead. You've been greenlit and it's like, go, go, go. And yet there's no one around, we just can't hire people. It's a very high impact. It's a game wide issue. Action taken none so in that case who. So, the, who just tells you who's accountable, who has to make it happen this could be somebody different. This is who's accountable, who actually is going to report back and tell you what they've been doing or their team has been doing. So, it doesn't have to be the person taking action. The person who's accountable should be the person who ultimately has to around say no, you're right. I was supposed to fix this. When is the deadline for when this thing might trigger and become getting turned from a risk to an issue? So, this was one example and I didn't really like it, but it was something we worked with and we worked through, like I said, I've just made up some examples here. So, let's look at power up so we could sell while we were not sure that we've got all the power ups that we need and they're not really ready. And there's people waiting for these power-ups because they fundamentally affect a level design and a whole bunch of other things and art and say, you can see that at a glance, people can look at the titles and go, okay, okay. That's what that is good. Right. Got it.
And you can do it this way if you want. It's one way, it's up to you. In all cases, project management, risk management, which is part of project management, it would always say to you, look, here's some ways of doing it, but really it depends upon what you need for your team, for the game size, for things that are particularly relevant to you, that might not be to anyone else. For example, this is an Excel spreadsheet. You may find that your teams much prefer to keep their risks and issues in JIRA. If that's what you're using, for example, and you could find that you've got a JIRA plugin, which has got risks and issues tracked, and you might use that instead and you can export a report when you need to, from there. It's fine, it's up to you. I do want to run through those some of the things that you really do need to take into account. I also want to caution you because I have seen some of these when I've worked in the private sector and public sector elsewhere. For example, especially working for say an education council in which the columns here go from "A" to "G" if you were to work in those places, the columns for their risk management files go into the hundreds and the rows and the columns. And the reason for that is because they don't just track say the name of a risk with some issues and some actions, what they track is a lot of math’s. So, they'll say, well, what's the score? What's the probability? What's the impact? What's the score of that? What's was the score when this was first raised? Okay. So, what's the score now? Okay.
So, what's the difference? How has it been? How's your mitigation of risks going and mitigation is when you're lowering the risk total number. So, it might say 25 and we've load it to 16 after two months. And you know well done. But that's really for governance. That's when you're working for companies or for governments where they really need to show audit trails, they need to show this stuff they're accountable for it. And when they're accountable to say the people who are paying them to shareholders, to legal entities, let's say you're working for a pharmacy, not a pharmacy, say you're working for pharma for a life science so people making drugs, et cetera, medicine. It's very important that they trace these risks and issues accurately and you can show that you've been doing your best to mitigate or to close these things down. In the case of games, I would argue that's too heavy. You will find that it really does need you to customize this for it to become what you need it to become. But let me just talk through why I don't think this is great example, but why it's a good start. It's a good start, right? Because you can just start typing in this. You can go, it's pretty easy to understand. I can make these categories anything I want. I can do this. Who, yeah, I can? I can fill that out. Recent issues. No problem. I can just write some stuff. Yeah. But where the problems are is that you can write anything and there are no rules more to the point, there are no standards. So, you don't really know what to write and what level of detail and yeah, I'll leave you thinking well, should I break that down into six risks? Is that one risk? What kind of writing style should I use here? And it can become really quite confusing. Let me show you another example.
So, if you go to the internet and you go, Ooh, show me some risk register templates. You'll see all sorts again, because if you do project management courses like the PMI, PMBOK, or Prince 2, they just make suggestions. They say, here are the basics, here's the foundation that you need to do it yourself. And it's one of the things I really, really dislike about project management courses. They don't tell you the full story. They don't put in the extra effort to tell you how to actually use something at least with the pan Balkan Prince too. But that's because they're just teaching you frameworks. You're just going through and ticking boxes really. As a result, a lot of people have put up examples online to help you out. So that's great. Right? So, here's another example here. So, you've got your first column is an ID because people like to reference IDs. Then the date that the risk was raised. So, I like to ask good idea, you know, how long the risk or the issue is been there. A description, a likelihood of the risk occurring and the impact of the risk occurs, that's very common that you'll have probability and impact. So, you say it's highly likely, and it's a very low impact in which you would say, Oh, well, who cares? Or you might say it's probable, it's like medium likelihood but it's an incredibly high critical impact if it does occur. And so, you would say, Oh, okay. So, we can measure the severity. And what you do there is you multiply the two together and you say, Hey, the school and the higher, that is the bigger the severity and you can put that up on a pretty graph if you want but that's severity is quite useful. You shouldn't become bound by it or to it, you should use your common sense. Oh, no person who will manage the risk. Yeah. Great. Again, I prefer accountable, but manage the risk is fine. Mitigating action. So, actions to mitigate the risk EG, reduce the likelihood. So, mitigation, as I said, is when you're trying to make something less likely to happen and in the case of an issue, you're trying to make it disappear. You're trying to make it go away and fix it.
Contingent action. So, if the risk was to happen, plan ahead, what would you do? And so that contingent action might be well, if it was to happen, then we should have a plan "B". And here's our plan "B". Now personally, I like to have contingent actions happening anyway, for the most serious issues and the more serious risks. So, for example, if you have a plan "B" going on in the background, because it's highly likely that plan "A" is going to fail because you already know that it probably is. If you get lucky, blah, blah, blah. But if you don't, it's more likely. And therefore, if you will contingent actions going ahead, if something's being done in the background, you've got your plan "B", you've managed to put some people, give them a little bit of time and it helps that when it becomes an issue you've already made some progress. You've learnt something. You've experimented use that say. So, let's say for example, there's a really important level that you're designing in a game and it looks like this really fundamental, critical level's going to fail. That you just can't put it together. In the background. You could have a small team working on another one, putting some new ideas together, or you would expect that to happen anyway, right? Because that kind of happens all the time, but here you can actually log it. You can write it down. Which means that if this is centrally located, senior management can come and have a look and you can point it to them.
And you can say, go and have a look at that issue. Then you'll see what we're doing and they'll have confidence. Now you might say, it's too prescriptive. It's too much documentation. It's too much too serious. We don't want to hear for project management. We're here for making fun games. If you are a person saying that you're wrong, you're not there to have fun. You're there to help people make very and complex products that happened to be called games and you need to take this stuff seriously. So, stop saying, we shouldn't be doing risks. We shouldn't be doing issues. Or this is all too serious. It wouldn't work in our place. You make it work. Even if you're the only person who looks at this stuff, at least you've got the list. And it means that you have daily actions that you can take from this list. You can be walking around going or zoom, calling people and going right. I've got a risk here, put down with you as the owner, what have you been able to do on it today or this week or whatever.
And you know, it's critical. It's critical impact. So, this is really important since you haven't done anything or since you have done that great or whatever, I'm now going to go and talk to these people over here about it. You can do that, right? And progress and actions J column here means that you can do that and you can have a date stamped list of what you're doing. And finally, status you can say, you can make whatever status up you want. And again, there are loads of examples on the internet. I'll give you some examples later. The status is really what's useful for you. So it could be that you show this to senior management people who are really, really, really hot on things like rank ratings, rank ratings are Red, Amber Green, traffic lights, Red being, Oh shit, Amber being, I think it's either getting better or it's getting a lot worse and Green being we're dandy.
Wherever I've worked, I've tried to introduce code Brown for when everything's gone to shit and I usually am able to. So, status is useful. If you use rag ratings, people can see at a glance visually, but you might want to put some text in there as well. You might want to say ongoing under investigation closed and you know, off you go, that's another example. Here's one that it's a bit better. I think. So. Let me just come back. So here, you've got one where we've added a few things. We've, we've made it a little bit more colorful and all that, which is nice, but let's go through it again. So, in this case, we have a description, but you'll know this time, what I've done is I've used rather like user cases in agile, where you can say, how's, are you somebody or other?
I would like to do this so that I can do this thing over here, whatever. Risk registers, you can do the same thing, right? You can do the same thing with risks. You can say, well, it's a bit confusing how I describe this risk. So, I'll tell you what let's use this terminology. If and event happens, then these are the consequences. If you use this terminology, if you use this way of describing risks, it's quite powerful because it forces you to think about it in that way. And it standardizes the language and people become used to talking risks in that way. So, for example, I've taken the first risk on the first tab. And I've said, if rail gun is not achievable, then we will need to find a new range weapon, which will impact upon schedule and design specs. So those are the consequences.
If we went back to the other example let's have a look. So, to produce our Baltimore list, we need confidence in the power up and rail guns not fundamentally altering for the asset list. We could say then if power-ups and rail guns are fundamentally altered, then we cannot produce our asset list with confidence and as a result, blah, blah, blah. So, you can, probably you put a lot more thought into it than I do, but off you go, you can fill that in and using that kind of if then is obviously great for coders. They love that. Reminds me of my Commodore pet days. But for everybody else, it's a common language. So, it becomes familiar. And that's very important because there's no more ambiguities, no more wondering what you're supposed to do. You go, that's the language I'm going to use. Then you'll see here. What I talked about just now about probability and impact where I've got it dropped down for scores one to 10 and you can say four. We'll color code it for you. Maybe a one, meaning probability is very low. Up to a 10, which is basically, it's certain pretty much. Impact from a one to a 10. Again, you can see over here, it's multiplying it to give you a risk score. And what it does is it multiplies it and divided by 10. So, 10 is the highest you can get. And you know, people do this in different ways. I've seen there's one, that's like a 25, 16, nine or 16, 11, 9 score, which is based upon other ways of multiplying things out and which you've got like 1 to 5s and what else sort of stuff. It doesn't matter. It doesn't have to be numbers. Right? You could say probability high, not very likely; you can use text impact you know, critical game breaking, not very high whatever you want, whatever works for you. You're the one who's going to have to be running this thing. If you're inheriting one that have a look at it and see if you can improve it because no one will care. If you say, Hey, do you know what? I think there's a few things that we can do, but here for the way we work, they'll just thank you because it means you're taking it seriously, a mitigation here and contingency, we've talked about those.
So, mitigation change the design to remove the main technical risk continue to see. So, the contingency is, if it's not working, then we would assign a designer decoder to work together on proposal replacement weapon, the producer to measure the cost. Cost there is a word that means many things. The cost in terms of change. What's the impact going to be when it spreads around other the people dependent upon this housing has it and they are with this one. Hire a responsible person or decoder. So, it's very clear in this example. So, and it's also simple. So, if he wants something simple, you've got everything here. You've got beef, then you've got some nice colors, which people like, and you've got some nice explanation about the fact that mitigation, you've thought of something to do contingency plan B and responsible person. But of course, straight off the internet, this example, you can see this thing's missing, right? So, where's the log of what you're doing. It's not in here is it? So, I prefer something like this. So here, we've got the date raised, Oh, I've got them stay there April the third 2020 description, if then the status. So, it can be I've put in this row to help you give some examples and describe what these columns are. So open, in other words, we've just raised a risk it's open. We don't know what to do yet. Investigating. So, we're looking into it. We'll get back to you as soon as we can with mitigation and contingencies. Implementing means, yeah, we have analyzed it. We've investigated it. We know what to do. And we're putting those changes in we're fixing this escalated means it's gone up woods, wherever that might go to, maybe it's a coding problem that's had to go to say a studio, coding director, or you know, a CTO or someone because it just needs their help, it needs somebody higher up to help. And resolved, so resolved hopefully means it's closed successfully, array. Internal, external.
So, do we own this? Or is it from outside? This can be really useful by the way. Not many people do this, but I've seen it and it really, really is handy because internal stuff, you own right, you're responsible. It's up to you to fix it. External means it's coming from external places. So maybe a publisher is leaning on you to meet a deadline for E3 or a milestone that needs to be delivered. Maybe there's an internal demo that's being shown to some marketing people, a publisher, and they need it ready. They need something, a vertical slice who knows something ready. And so, you'd put external and it's just, it's helpful because it just, it means you can in sheets or Excel or whatever, you can just filter things. You can say, just show me external, just show me internal, whatever. So, it's nice. Right? So, you can use this to filter down and go.
Here's all the external stuff that's coming. Maybe you've got a writer that you're relying on who's late or a voiceover artist, or you know, anything maybe it's to do with outsourcing companies and they can't get you stuff in time, or there's a possibility that the people you're going to need are going to be on holiday for the period. You need them and et cetera, et cetera. Probability impact we've covered and the risk score we've covered it just by buying five by 10, they call it coding, thrown in automatically, using conditional formatting, mitigation and contingencies. So, we just repeated them but, in my case, I've moved them so they're into the same area, because I think that that shows that you've thought about it and you don't need to move it across two columns because this column should be here. Right? The updates and comments, which is missing from the previous one, which is what you've actually done about it. And you'll notice its date stamped, because you need to leave a record here. You need to show people regular updates. Yeah. Okay. It can become quite long.
So, what just close the row up if you need to, I would advise, well, that's a bit counterintuitive. I would advise putting the latest update at the top because what you can do then, and in XO on the windows, you can use alt shift to open up here. You can put some new text in, do a few more options. Put more updates in just pretend. And then for the purposes of people's brains, you can close it back up a little bit and as long as we have that showing things at the top up here. I'm showing at the top here, you can do that. You can just select it and say, top line, the latest will be up here, but you know, but you can track it down and you see a history. Alright. So, it's just a simple thing because double clicking on it like that, we'll open it. So, it fills up all the content that fills to the content. So, it's a nice way of just making things easier to read while keeping a big log. Now of course what I would suggest is, but when something's resolved, you should keep it there for say a week or so until the next leadership meeting. So, you can show people that that's been resolved but then you should move it to another tab. So just come down here and do a resolve tab and just shift it straight over and get rid of it and don't delete anything, never delete stuff. If it's resolved, don't delete it for God's sake because you've got a history and you need that. If particularly interesting things happened, but you can learn from you want to move over to resolve and you want to give yourself a process where you say, when I've moved this over, okay, give myself a little retrospective here.
Do I need to get people together? Do we need to have a little chat about this and determine a change in the process to make things more efficient? Remember, this is continual improvement. You want to continually improve yourself, continually improve the teams, the making of the game. Everything that you do, you show you off one day on say making a level. And if you're making a lot of levels, you've said, you've just saved a lot of time, but everything you do should be, how can I reduce waste? How can I make this more efficient? Because every time you do that, it adds up and you could be saving people, a whole world of crunch. So, updates and comments here, owner Bob, the coder. So, every week you can talk to Bob, the coder and you can say, here's an update. And I want to say every week, it just depends. Some of these things are so high up. If we go back to the original example, staffing let's see. Say, you've got a PS5 investigation and you need to identify PS5 is, and you've got, I've got as soon as possible in this case, but maybe you've got six months to find these people and get on with it. Can you say, look, six months down the line, we're going to be in trouble. So, six months down the line, you can say, well, it's been in here for six months and we've done all we can. And you've got a log of everything you've done. And if somebody comes along and starts yelling, you can say, well, actually this is what we've done. We have escalated it. We have made you aware. These are all the things that we've tried, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And that's important. It might not sound like it should be important. You might go. That's not right, but it is. Believe me important. And think about it another way.
Should you be hit by a bus? Should you step away and find another job somewhere? Should you be promoted to gold hood and become an angel somewhere? You need to hand this over. And if you've got a proper list here that my God people will want to make mad love to you because this is so rare that you would actually have a proper log here. So, do it now. I want to add it with issues. So here we go. Same thing again, right?
Nothing's really changed. Except I've added in a new column here, which is, is it a risk or an issue? Now you can do every light. You could maybe color code stuff like made a little attempt here instead. Do whatever you be like but here the risk is the same. But what's happened now is it's become an issue. So, status, I've added now an issue. Now this can get a bit silly because I've seen this before, where you have both the issue and the risk. What I would do is as soon as it's now an issue, I would move it over to a now an issue tab. So, you'd have a resolve tab and now an issue tab, which kind of sounds a bit silly. You can call it archive if you want, but really this stuff needs to move. Archive might work better for you usually works better for me. So, you shift it over because no one wants to see the risk and the issue in the same spreadsheet you will. Of course, I'm sure have seen if you've seen these things before, you will have seen that people have different types of risks and different tasks for issues. I hate that. Why? Because it doesn't make any damn sense because what you find is that you go to a meeting and people go let's review our reviews and our risks and issues, right? Starting with risks, then they will end and people will go, oh shit, we spent seven on two of my risks. We never reached the issues. Or they'll do it the other way around. Oh, we only talked about issues. Although, you know what? People nearly, always want to talk about risks first rather than, than what's actually happening. It's bizarre. I don't know why that is. Maybe it's different in your experience, but that's been mine. I prefer to put them together. But you make damn sure that you tidy them up before you show them to anyone else.
So, in this case, this it's now an issue. I'd leave it there. The first meeting in which I'm presenting this to other people, I'd leave it there. Then as soon as that meeting is over, I'm moving it out the way because it's the issue now, that's the important thing. No one cares about the old risk. It failed, right? You've failed to mitigate it or somebody failed or it just couldn't be resolved. And when I say failure, I'm not judging anybody. I mean, literally people tried, right? Everyone tried their absolute best. It didn't work. Moving on. It's an issue let's get on with it. This is where it's interesting because your mitigation and contingencies mean you've already thought about contingencies, so you're ready to go. And it could be, but you've already started them working. So actually, maybe you've already got a bit of a head start.
It depends. Right? If you're lucky, it depends on what other people were doing and if you had anybody. So here, there's no probability because it's happened. The impact is still an impact. The risk score doesn't count. Who cares? Right? Just ignore. But now you can put issues and risks together and you can order these things however you want. So, you could put in any extra column just to help you with that. But if you have a leadership meeting column where you have a yes or a no, and you simply tack by that or filter by that and say, show me everything marked as yes. And it would just show that stuff. And then you go to a leadership meeting and you talk through only those things that are shown. And then, then you can show them the things that aren't, that you didn't want to show them if there's time. The reason for doing that is guarantee you, you spend one hour talking through risks and issues you'll get through about six. Because you hit the first one maybe you'll be lucky. And people go, Oh, that's resolved now. Oh, is it? Oh, okay, okay, well, so what should we put into the update’s comments? Oh, well yeah. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah happened. And then you guarantee that somebody in the room will go, well, hang on. Are you sure that worked? Because I was talking to so and so this morning just for this meeting and they told me that actually that, that had happened, but it hadn't fixed the problem. And then the original person goes, well, I got told it had fixed the problem. And then, you know, yeah, that's life, right? That's just life. That's just the way it is.
Again, making games is complicated. And you know information is all important but inflammation changes all the time. My advice to you is go around beforehand, go to each of the owners before the meeting, get a personal update from them, make the changes and when you get to the meeting, they've already been primed because you've been talking to them about it. They've already been primed about what to do and what to say and it cuts down having to make bloody edits. I'll tell you what, I've sat with enough project managers and junior producers that just drives me mad that that'll just sit there and they'll make, and by the way, this isn't just the games industry this is everywhere. They make their job in a meeting to just sit there typing. Oh, sorry. Could you say that again? Sorry. What'd you mean? How do you spell that? But no shut up. All you're doing is stopping highly paid people talking quickly to each other. Just shut up. So, if you do it beforehand and you go around op decoder, the design lead, whoever these people who actually turn up to the meetings. Op decoder might not, but the others will. They are already briefed, right? They've already updated this. They are grateful to you. What you have got here is an up to date, living, breathing document. And that's the worst thing in the world is to turn up and go what's this this risk. Oh yeah. I'd forgotten about that. Oh yeah. I'm down as the owner, aren't I? What was it again? Oh yeah. I'll chase that one and get back to you. Okay. What's that accomplished? You're in a leadership meeting. What's that accomplish nothing. All you've done is made that person feel a bit stupid or not give a shit. And you've made yourself look stupid because you didn't prepare.
So, it's not just about the template, right? It's not just about stuff that you're typing. It's about how you handle chasing how you handle the transparency, the visibility, how you handle mitigation, contingencies and next steps. Because if you put the work in beforehand, when you get to these meetings and this should be your meeting etiquette, generally. When you get to these meetings, you're ready. You're pumped. You're like, this is great. I've gone to all these people. I've made all the updates. I'm going to have the bosses sat here going, Holy shit. You've got your shit together. Now it could be, if you're a junior producer and you only own a part of this, but you can't do that for everything, right? Do it for your bit. Take control of the bits you own, maybe talk to the others and get them to join you in this process and do it properly.
It's really important. This is one of the most important things that you can do as a producer or as a project manager if that's your job under a product manager. If you're in a mobile, for example, you're not here to be prescriptive. You're not here to tell people they have to give you an accurate probability and impact score. And if they get it wrong, they'll be in trouble. This is not the case. You're not dealing with trained professional project manager types. You know, I've worked in the medical industry where everyone's got title and they all sound very impressive. And you've got your change managers and you've got risk managers for God's sake. That's a full-time job, alright, you sit with these people. My God, yeah triple the number of columns. You're there all day. You're there all day just trying to write one risk down and it takes a committee of 10 people to just go. So, what's the risk then, or I'm not sure. I agree with your terminology. The same thing will happen here. Right? Do it beforehand. One thing that will happen when you go through these in the meetings is that new risks and issues come up and it will be very tempting for people to enter them on the spot here. Be careful the moment that that turns into a discussion. You make a note of who the people are, who are discussing and you stop it if you can. And you say, thank you very much. That's brilliant. I'll just talk to you at the end of the meeting. If you just, yeah, I'll come find it. We'll just stay behind at the end or whatever works, right? Because the longer people start discussing terminal wording terminology if it should be an eight or a seven or something, the more the rest of the people in the room are being paid to do nothing.
And people making games it's not about being paid. It's about wasting time. People hate that right? Because these people are so busy that the seniors, they work so hard and with a great positive attitude and a good heart, don't waste that time. Don't hold them to a meeting, trying to work out if the risk score is accurate or fixing some spelling or having three people in a room arguing about who the owner is, just do it afterwards. Just go great. I'm just going to write down a quick description on effect for risk, right? That's if then as then, depending there's an issue done, right? Moving on because what are you going to achieve? If you waste 10 people, 10, sorry, 10 minutes time over like eight people in a room. Well, if you achieved wasted, do it afterwards. You're not going to be able to resolve this thing here anyway. Now it's easy for me to say that and I'm saying it because I've lived through it, it's actually really difficult to shut people up who are your bosses and it's up to you if you want to try or not. But you can go to the person who is the ultimate head of the particular leadership team meeting. You can go to the boss and say, hello, please could you help me? In the future do you think we could deal with this out of the meeting and get them to help. And he, or she'll say, yeah, great. Of course, honestly, they don't care. People just want to be helpful. People want to do more and more efficient things. People don't want to be at meetings. They hate meetings. Meetings are stupid. This meeting needs to not be stupid. And it's one of the meetings of the worst reputation because I swear to God, I've sat in rooms with seven people and we have in one hour we have gone through one risk and it's not even a great, important risk, but people have chosen to just talk. And if you let people talk, they don't stick to the topic.
They will make it something else and then it will turn into discussions about many very interesting and useful things. And you might resolve a whole bunch of matters that needed to be resolved but what you didn't do was your risks and issues. So, stick to the point, interrupt people, right? Just if you need to be a bit of a school master of school, mistress, do it. If you need to be a bit of a mum or a dad do it, take control. People really, honestly, don't mind. They're not going to sack you. Then they're not going to get up uppity, just be, have a sense of humor about it. Make a joke, just, you know, say something funny, get the attention back, carry on. You know that bit. Yeah, nearly all of you. If your producers are very, very friendly. Genuinely funny, disarming, charming and handsome and beautiful people as I am. We are all like that. Right. We know that bit but it will make your jobs so much easier if you have these tactics in place during the meeting to say, right, it's going out of control. Here's how I control it. Crack a joke. Grab them back, tell them we'll deal with that afterwards. They won't mind. They'll just go. Yeah, sure. Of course. Really the more senior people are, the more willing they are to listen to how to follow a process because they want you to succeed.
I've never worked anywhere where people have been against to producers. I've always worked in places where people have gone, Oh, thank God producers. Please do your job properly because we really need your help. And so, do it properly, right? Help them. You're just there to help. And help comes in many forms and helps really difficult to deliver in some cases and making games and delivering help just do your best. And just remember that everyone's doing their best. Don't make this prescriptive. Don't be that person who becomes an anal project manager, who has to every on the hour, every hour goes around and update this thing. This is a living, breathing document, the spice to help. Right? But in the background, that's where all the other people are doing the work. You're not, it's all other people. You're just chasing things.
Now, of course, it depends upon your role and your job and your duties. But you know, the more junior you are, to be honest with you, then the more you're reporting back. People ask you for help when they start trusting you. And this is the sort of thing where you earn people's trust, you show them this sort of regimented way of doing things and they'll go, Oh God, but you then show them the process around it that supports these problems, being solved and these logs being kept and the continuous improvement to make it not happen again, et cetera, et cetera. And they start going, Oh right. Actually, when we reported a risk and issue to you, something happened, it was a result. And that's how you win people over.
So, I've whittled on enough. Thank you for listening. I'm going to make these available and some links as well to some interesting articles and stuff like that. I've seen that I thought if you're particularly interested, you may want to see further. Well, thanks very much. And please do leave comments and subscribe and all the usual stuff. Thank you.
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