IGDA Calls For Proposals For Second Leadership Forum

Organizers of the second annual IGDA Leadership forum have announced a call for proposals, open to any session ideas relating to personal leadership, project leadership and management leadership for its November 14-15 conference in San Francisco. IGDA notes that its inaugural forum was a "smashing success" with over 300 participants from over 15 countries and sessions by Don Daglow (Stormfront Studios), Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk (BioWare), Tim Schafer (Double-Fine), Mike Capps (Epic Games) and Clinton Keith (ex High Moon Studios). IGDA says the Forum is "valuable for producers, discipline leads, project managers, studio directors, and all others seeking to become better leaders, create successful games, and learn from other working professionals in the game industry." Its latest Forum is expanding with parallel tracks on personal leadership, project leadership and management leadership, and says the sessions will cover the following: Personal Leadership sessions will cover the skills we all need to be successful leaders, such as: * effective communication * entrepreneurialism and taking initiative * persuasion and making ideas stick * personality analysis (Myers-Briggs, etc) * handling challenging situations/conflict * personal time management and “life hacking” * career planning * “personal MBA” Project Leadership sessions will focus on the nuts and bolts of game production, such as: * development methodologies and best practices * risk assessment and analysis * scheduling and scoping techniques * pipeline optimization * pre-production and prototyping * post-mortems and case studies * metrics * outsourcing and remote development Management Leadership sessions will cover broader scale topics that go beyond a single team or project, such as: * multi-team/site management * company culture and sharing a core vision * motivation and morale * hiring and retention strategies * 3rd party relationship management * studio lifecycle planning and scaling * HR best practices * quality of life * workforce development/training Anyone interested in proposing session ideas or wanting more information on the Leadership Forum can visit the official website.