New to Project Management? Play Asteroids!
Introduction
Let's be honest, becoming a project manager can feel like strapping yourself into the pilot’s seat of a rocketship for the first time.?
The control panel’s knobs and dials all have labels that seem like a foreign language, like Work Breakdown Structure, Stakeholder Management, and Capacity Planning. The radar screen is equally bewildering, displaying things like a nebula of Risk Assessment and a constellation of Scope Creep. It's enough to make even the most seasoned space commander want to hide in an airlock. And don't even get me started on the dreaded PMP certification exam! It has enough g-forces to turn your brain to mush.
But what if a classic video game could help your introduction into the basics of project management? Enter Asteroids, a deceptively simple game with surprising lessons for navigating the complexities of project management.
Asteroids was introduced to the world as a coin-operated arcade game by Atari in 1979. Since then, it has achieved unparalleled success, in part because the gameplay is refreshingly straightforward.
It presents a 2D top-down perspective where you maneuver a spaceship amidst a field of moving asteroids. The primary objective is to shoot and destroy these asteroids to clear the screen and earn points. Occasionally, a UFO will appear and start shooting at your ship, which you must avoid but also defeat for extra points. And with each cleared screen, you’re faced with a progressively more challenging succession of asteroid-filled levels.
Ultimately, if you manage to achieve a sufficiently high score, you can proudly record your initials on the leaderboard. Getting on the leaderboard is the whole point of playing Asteroids. Unsurprisingly, as with many arcade games, there is an optimal strategy for getting a high score.
Now, you might be wondering what a game like Asteroids has to do with project management. Believe it or not, playing Asteroids provides a surprisingly relevant roadmap to achieving this outcome-oriented approach.
Asteroids’ Optimal Strategy
Achieving a high score in Asteroids follows a systematic approach that’s efficient, predictable, and repeatable.
In the mid-1980s, I watched an expert player, a teenager, who effortlessly surpassed any score I had ever seen accomplished using just a single quarter. After about 20 minutes of gameplay, he turned to me and offered to let me take over as he had to leave to meet some friends. Naturally, I couldn't resist asking him the secret behind his success.
He told me that novice players tend to adopt a shoot-everything-in-sight approach, aiming to quickly accumulate points through eye-hand coordination. However, this approach is a mistake. A cluttered screen with too many objects makes it challenging to evade collisions. The result is certain doom and with no initials on the leaderboard.
He kindly ushered me into the inner circle where the unwashed masses are forbidden - where secrets of expert Asteroids players abound. And now I pass them along to you!
When the game starts, your ship is in the center of the screen. Why? Because it’s the sweet spot where you can be the most agile in moving and shooting. Because of this, the best strategy for moving your ship is to only do so to avoid colliding with an asteroid. If you ever get too far off-center, work to get back.
Study the patterns of how shooting an asteroid breaks it apart into fragments so you can anticipate the moving pieces and navigate safely. You'll notice fragments can sometimes move fast and at an unpredictable angle.
Keep the number of on-screen hazards to a minimum, and the best way to do that is to focus on one asteroid at a time, shooting it, and then only shooting its resulting fragments.
Use the FIRE button only when you know what you’re going to hit and what the outcome will be.
After you’ve finished destroying the fragments from one boulder, shift your attention to only one of the remaining asteroids.
When the UFO appears, stop everything else and focus on destroying it. Be careful when you shoot at it because if you miss, you may inadvertently break up other asteroids and clutter the screen.
The game has a button labeled HYPER SPACE. Only use it when you’re about to die because it teleports your ship to a random place on the screen and may put you in the path of another asteroid.
That’s pretty much it. Like I said, deceptively simple.
Little did this expert Asteroids player know that his brief coaching session would prove to be one of the most valuable eight minutes of instruction I’d ever received.
Project Managing Asteroids
Let's break down the advice provided by my Asteroids coach and analyze how each element relates to project management.
Project Vision
The desired outcome is to attain a score that secures a spot on the leaderboard, preferably at the top. And right now your score is zero AND you’re NOT on the leaderboard.?
This equates to WHY you're undertaking the project and what your starting point is. This is an essential step in figuring out the scope of your project
Rules of Engagement - Constraints
Next, familiarize yourself with the basics of Asteroids, the way asteroids move and break apart, how scoring works, what gives you extra lives, and what you must do when the UFO appears.
In the project management world, this is similar to learning the constraints of a given project, who has approval, how to get it, what tools and methods you’re allowed to use, the documentation that's required, how often and what details you must communicate to stakeholders, and who else is involved and what are their roles.
Strategy
Next, learn the controls for playing Asteroids, understand the screen layout, how scoring works, and how to earn bonus points and extra lives. Some rules are printed on the cabinet, but other rules must be discerned through observation and experimentation.
Study the game’s attract mode, which briefly simulates a player when no one is actively playing. Analyze this gameplay sequence and pay attention to the movement patterns of the asteroids.
These insights are roughly correlated in the project manager realm with learning, not just the needs of your customers, but how the problem you're trying to solve fits within the context of their life situation, as well as what other challenges they face. As you gather insights, you’ll start to understand what’s essential, what are nice-to-haves, and how best to solve their primary problem, as well as what not to do.
Discovery
Now you’re ready to press the START button and begin to play.?
The early levels of Asteroids are designed to teach you how to play with minimal risk. Are there certain movements that are better than others? Is the center always the best place to stay? If you hide behind a fragment, can you get the UFO to destroy it?
Use the early game levels to learn how to identify what’s the most important thing you must do next, how to recognize the biggest threats at any given moment and how will you respond to the unexpected.?
If you're playing a version of the game that allows two simultaneous players, the game’s early levels are where you can figure out how you’ll communicate and coordinate!?
On a project in the real world, the discovery phase is where you can brainstorm and experiment with ideas on what can get you closer to the desired outcome. You may guide your team to produce prototypes, stress-test various processes, adopt methodologies, and develop tools, as well as agree on how you’ll go about testing your team’s output to ensure the product meets quality standards.?Remember, you're producing an outcome, not output.
The ultimate goal of the discovery phase is to get your team to agree on what they will deliver and how they will deliver it.
Cynefin and Asteroids
Before we go any further, I want to take you on a little detour to introduce you to an esoteric conceptual framework for decision-making known as Cynefin (pronounced ku-NEF-in). Discussing the intricacies of the Cynefin framework is beyond the scope of this article and Wikipedia already has a great entry on this subject, but briefly here are the highlights.
Cynefin outlines four possible pathways that take you from disorder (where you are at the beginning of a project) to order (which is where you want to be at the end of your project). Your project will fall into one of these four domains, so getting acquainted with the Cynefin framework, even just a little, will help you decide on an approach to managing your project.
CLEAR
The first Cynefin domain is CLEAR. It's where there are known knowns, where work on a particular endeavor is clear and familiar, and almost always the same without deviation, like an assembly line. The approach for performing work in this domain is to sense the facts, categorize the scenario, and respond according to a specific rule. Whenever you hear the term “best practice,” it’s almost always associated with the CLEAR domain of Cynefin.
COMPLICATED
Next is the COMPLICATED domain where you have known unknowns. This is where the situation is knowable yet unfamiliar, where you have a range of correct ways to go about your work, and where you rely upon subject matter experts. Your doctor, lawyer, and structural engineers operate in this domain, as does machine learning. Your approach to performing COMPLICATED work is to sense the facts, analyze the situation using expertise, and then respond with the best option.
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COMPLEX
The COMPLEX domain of Cynefin is where you have unknown unknowns but you’re looking for at least one solution. In these projects, the situation is fluid, the solution cannot be known ahead of time, and you must analyze the past to discern the path forward, often with experimentation. If you’re trying to manage an ecosystem, improve a corporate culture, or are an actuarial who uses statistics to determine insurance premiums and coverage, this is your domain. In this scenario, you would probe the situation with experimentation, sense the patterns that emerge, and then respond with steps that bring you closer to the desired outcome. But be prepared for change.?
CHAOTIC
Finally, there is the CHAOTIC domain of Cynefin where the solution is unknowable, where you act to establish order, sense where there is stability, and then respond to bring the CHAOTIC into the COMPLEX domain. Projects that involve rapid responses to a catastrophe, or an outage are CHAOTIC. Think of the scene from Apollo 13 where the NASA technicians dump out a box of supplies and have to figure out how to get a square air filter to work in a round receptacle. Ironically, this is also where the most innovation emerges.?
As a budding project manager, you would do well to look at your project through the lens of these four domains to determine how to bring order from disorder.
So, where does playing Asteroids fit in this picture??
I think a strong case could be made that playing the game falls into the CHAOTIC domain, especially if you’re playing for the first time.
Asteroids are flying around the screen in a seemingly random manner, and you’re unsure how to go about clearing the screen without making things worse. It’s only through shooting a few asteroids (act) to see what actions result in bringing the most order (sense) and where you would innovate an optimal strategy (respond) to reduce the chaos to a more manageable, albeit, COMPLEX domain.
If your project is one where you only know your starting point and your desired outcome, your discovery phase will be chaotic, and you'll approach what and how to deliver a solution by brainstorming, experimenting, conducting research, creating prototypes, engaging in A/B testing, and performing other activities that help you discover how to deliver the solution to the problem you're trying to solve; you begin in the CHAOTIC domain and are moving toward the COMPLEX domain.
And in projects where you're not responding to a disaster, DISCOVERY on a CHAOTIC project can also prove to be one of the most fulfilling stages of a project.
Delivery
The final phase of a project is delivery, which involves developing, testing, and preparing the solution for release.?
Delivery also has an optimal strategy.?
Back to Asteroids, the optimal strategy involves destroying ONE asteroid and each of its fragments before proceeding to other asteroids. This has several benefits. It will keep you agile so you can rapidly respond when a UFO appears on the screen. You’re also keeping the number of on-screen hazards to an absolute minimum to keep things more manageable and predictable.
In project management, these correspond to agile development and limiting work in progress, fancy terms that can be summed up briefly as:
1) developing one or two components at a time from a larger project to a state where it can be released; this approach enables your customer to use what you developed (gaining value early) and to make any changes to the project to keep up with market dynamics, and...
2) limiting work-in-progress, or WIP limit, which, among other things, helps the development team maintain focus and flow, and avoid context switching that can reduce productivity and increase the potential for error. When playing Asteroids, breaking one boulder at a time means most of your attention is devoted to clearing the screen of THAT boulder and its detritus.?When there are fewer hazards on the screen, it becomes easier to focus and achieve your desired outcome more predictably. You also have better visibility, more manageable risks, and reduced effort, all of which contribute to meeting your milestones on time. Additionally, having fewer objects on screen makes it easier to pivot and address unexpected events, such as a UFO appearing.
Inspect and Adapt
As with Asteroids, once you’re in the delivery phase of a project, don’t be tempted to stray from the optimal strategy.?The game gets progressively harder, so becoming proficient in the optimal strategy becomes essential to achieving a high score worthy of the top spot on the leaderboard.
The best way to get better at playing Asteroids is to inspect how you are playing to see where you can improve at maintaining the optimal strategy, and then adapt your play style with slight tweaks to make you more proficient, stay focused, and get into “the flow.”?
The practice of inspect-and-adapt is practically universal in how we, as humans improve and make progress, whether it’s mastering a golf swing, putting on a TV show, planting a garden, building a bridge, or playing a video game. So too should it be an essential element of project management.?
After completing a phase and delivering a component, take some time to inspect your work. Identify what you did well and what could be improved. Then, use the lessons learned to adapt how you approach the next deliverable, all with the aim of continually improving your work.
Measuring Your Work
How do you know if you're improving? You need to figure out how to measure improvement.?
In Asteroids, you’re awarded points and extra lives as the game progresses.?
In project management, there are tools for measuring progress, like cycle time, added value, and velocity. These tools are useful for both tracking progress and improving processes.?
But no matter what method you use, the old adage remains true; you can’t improve what you don’t measure. The corollary in Asteroids is, if there weren’t points and ways to earn them, you’ll never make it to the leaderboard.
Plan B - Hyper Space
As the Asteroids expert I mentioned at the beginning of this article advised, only use HYPER SPACE as a last resort when no other viable options exist for survival.?
In project management, this means staying aware of what your greatest risks are and having a plan for addressing or mitigating those risks. Murphy’s Law (where anything that can go wrong, will go wrong) plays a prominent part in project management; having a backup plan for the most likely failure is always good advice.
Delivery and Success
Success in Asteroids is not defined by beating the game; that’s impossible! The objective is to earn a score high enough to get on the leaderboard, preferably at the top.
When you’re managing a project, it’s important to know what constitutes success. To determine if you're truly delivering something that solves the problem you were tasked with solving, think about success using these four perspectives.
Can you deliver a solution to the problem:
Here’s how those four perspectives apply to the Asteroids video game.
Thousands of Asteroids “coin-op” cabinets found their way into arcades around the world because producing and delivering them was something Atari could do with the expertise and resources they had.?
Players flocked to play the game and it became an instant classic as a game that was easy to play and hard to master; its play mechanic matched how players wanted to play.?
Playing the game was straightforward and didn’t require the player to learn a long set of rules and it only cost a quarter to play. Players found playing the game easy to understand and use.?
And the game both, elevated the stature of Atari as a video game innovator, and support in the field was straightforward - it was good for the business.?
By all accounts, the game of Asteroids garners a high score (no pun intended) in all four perspectives.
Conclusion
Keep in mind that learning the optimal strategy for succeeding at Asteroids is just a starting point. And while the real world of project management is a bit more complex, the lessons learned in the arcade offer a solid foundation.?
So, are you ready to level up your project management skills??
Grab your controller and press the START button.
Welcome to the leaderboard project management.