Rules: Project Management Tactics

Project Management Tactics are like small unit tactics or mixed unit tactics in that they are performed by a team with a defined leader. The leader (called a Project Manager, or sometimes Scrum Master) who can also be an actor on the team.

The leader picks a single action type from the list below, and can use it on the extended task.

Splitting the Task

A proper team can split tasks into smaller atomic units of action that can be accomplished in parallel. However, these are harder to accomplish on their own. The team must sit down and the leader assigns them the subtasks. Make a Logic+Professional Knowledge (Project Management) roll, against a difficulty set by the time the extended action would take.

0: Combat Turn

1: Minute

2: Hour

3: Day

5: Week

7: Month

The task can be split into a number of subtasks equal to the net hits on this roll. The difficulty of the subtasks is assigned at their creation, and the total difficulty of the subtasks must equal the difficulty of the original task. So for example, a team wanted to reown a commlink (difficulty 24, 1 hour). The project manager rolls 7 successes. They can make the task 5 tasks is a difficulty of 5,6,3,5,5, or a more even 5,5,5,5,4, if if they have one superstar, 4,4,4,4,8. If they had rolled 8 successes they could have done 4,4,4,4,4,4 as tasks. Subtasks are not extended actions and must be completed in one roll, however they take as long as a single roll for the task, so in the example above each subtask would take 1 hour. The main advantage is that they can be done in parallel, and if someone fails at a subtask, someone else can perform it later. Once each subtask is done, the original task is completed.

Idea Sharing

A major advantage of a team is the value of new ideas and the ability to bounce ideas off each other. This reduces the stagnation that grinding away at a task on your own will cause. The Project Manager make a Logic+Professional Knowledge (Project Management) roll against a difficulty of the highest Intuition on the team. If successful, additional Help successes beyond the skill of the leader can be used to reduce retry penalties on a task.

Specialist Skills

Sometimes you have a varied team with several skills. This means that the helpers might not be the best on the team for the task. By reframing pieces of a task, a skilled project manager can take the pieces of a task and make varied kinds of knowledge apply.

The Project Manager rolls Logic+Professional Knowledge (Project Management) and can allow people to help with less related skills. They can spend successes: 2 to allow a skill in the same skill group, 4 to allow a skill in the same category (Technical/Magical/Vehicle/Physical and so on). So if a Project Manager rolls 6 successes on a Matrix Search, they can allow Software (same Skill Group), and Hacking (same category), or allow Software and Hardware (with 2 unsed remaining successes). The player of the project manager must explain how the users of unrelated skills are helping, with the GM allowed to veto skills that stretch the boundaries too much.

Mythical Man Month

Project Management is ideally less about getting the job done, and more about getting the job done efficiently and quickly. The hardest part is that it's a problem of coordination. Adding more people to a team might make it faster, or just bog everything down. By becoming a perfect information hub, a good Project Manager can speed up a project by adding people.

The project manager rolls Logic+Professional Knowledge (Project Management) with a difficulty of the number of people involved in the action. Their net hits become the limit that someone may contribute to speed. Then when the Helpers roll their dice, they can split their successes between performance and speed. Every success added to speed reduces the time taken by 10%.

So if Silk, Malta, and StATIc are trying to work on a car together, and staTIC has Engineering 4, she can also roll Project Management. She gets 5 hits. Malta rolls 4 successes on his Auto Mechanic, and Silk rolls 5. Malta and Silk can communally put 4 dice to aid Jynx, and can each use up to 3 successes to reduce the time taken. Because it's a fairly long stretch of downtime, they elect that Silk and Malta each put in 2 successes to help, and the rest to speeding it up for a total of 50%. Had they been under stress, Malta could have put all but 1 of his successes to speed, and Silk all but 2, leading to only +3 for stATic but a 60% reduction.

This cannot reduce the time by more than 90%.