#8 - Not enough management

On the other hand, the days of "creative chaos" are gone.  What we do isn't hacking anymore; it's software engineering.  When you program an engine for 3-6 products, the code has to be a lot more robust and general than it was back when we erased everything from the hard drive two days after release.  And when there are 30 people working on the same product, someone has to keep track of which of the 3,000 asset files are final and which are place-holders.

Beginners often try to make do without producers, saying that they don't need oppression to get the job done.  Well, they may not need oppression, but a clear idea of where they are going is still a pretty handy tool.  I know of a team that wasted a whole year of effort because they had no change control policy, which let different programmers make incompatible on-the-fly architecture decisions while a bored designer ran amok and rewrote everything several months into production.  And I still have nightmares about a certain project which was supposed to turn gold two weeks after I was hired as head of studio at Company A: the producer had implemented no quality control policies, all of her experienced staff had left and been replaced by newbies, nobody had bothered to check up on the work, and as a result this six-month project was only completed at the cost of a seven-month red-eye marathon and a major feature hatchet-job.

Step #9