Lack Of Commitment

If you're trying to assemble a team, sooner or later you're going to run into people who are not dedicated, but are instead "all talk, but no action." These people care more about impressing others than they do about getting things done; they're the ones who show a small sample of amazing work, but then fail to produce anything more. Frequently, they lie about the status of their work, using high-tech variants on the dog-ate-my-homework-excuse, like "my drive crashed, and I lost everything," or "I accidentally deleted the folder, and I emptied the trash before I realized it."

Learn to recognize and avoid these people at all costs. That, however, is easier said than done. It's very difficult to spot a lie in an email message, or in a chat room, and everyone makes mistakes; I've deleted stuff I've needed, and I've had hard drives crash on me. Knowing how to discern who's not dedicated to the project is tricky, but it gets easier over time – the people who are dedicated will have produced something, and the people who could care less will still be making excuses. After a few months of solid development, you'll be able to separate the people who "walk the walk" from the people who simply "talk the talk."

The best way to combat lack of commitment is to brush the non-committed people off to the side of the project. Make it known from the start that the people who demonstrate that they do the most work are the ones who get the big projects. Don't assign the task of developing your main character animations to the slacker artist; give him the background animations instead. The nice thing about this system is that frequently, the big projects are also the exciting ones, so team members who work more get to do the fun stuff, which is As It Should Be.

Developers as Play Testers?