SMU Guildhall Graduate Catalog Spring 2020 — Cohort 28 | Page 64

Alaetheia Garrison Stuber Weston Wong Production « Improving Video Game Development Team’s Organizational Culture with Postmortems For my thesis project, I focused my I followed that with another 110 hours improve video game development teams it pertains to my list of root causes. research on using organizational culture to based on their postmortems. I spent 224 hours analyzing both professional and student postmortems to identify common types of mistakes made by game development teams. I used the results of my analysis to create a survey on common mistake types, which I sent to game developers in leadership positions. A list of the 20 most common game developer mistakes was generated from the survey results. For the second part of my research, I spent 200 hours reading in depth about project management, game development, leadership, and team management to discover the root cause behind each of the top 20 development mistakes. 64 PRODUCTION researching organizational culture and how Through my extensive research, I was able to map each of the top 20 mistakes made by game development teams to different elements of organizational culture. This mapping is intended to be used as a tool to improve game development teams by allowing leadership to directly address organizational culture issues.