According this case study answer the 4 question at the end of this:

Case study:

My name is John Kedge. I was recently promoted to the position of Director of Development at Dunamis, an American video game company that produces both console and mobile games. I have fifteen years experience developing games. I have managed a few teams during my career, but this senior leadership role is new to me. I am honored to have been offered this position even though it adds a lot of complexity to my day-to-day life. But I am starting to get the hang of things within my new role. The video game industry is now larger than ever, with revenues surpassing the global music industry and movie box office combined. The COVID-19 pandemic further accelerated this trend. This success has created an extremely challenging environment for video game companies. Players relentlessly look for more and more innovative and engaging games, and video game companies compete with higher and higher production costs. To break out of the competition of traditional games, Dunamis assigned me to create and produce a differentiated and low-cost mobile game. This is my first real test as Director of Development, and I need to be up to the task. My team and I came up with the idea of a free-to-download mobile game called War Game. Our aim is to make it one of Dunamiss biggest creative successes while keeping it low-cost and highly profitable for the company. War Game is a strategy game where players join alliances and fight against other alliances to build the biggest empire. Players can spend real money to purchase in-game currency so they can upgrade their empire. The main goal for us is to build a worldwide closed community, using social components and an instant universal translator so that the entire world can play together, no matter what their language is. To lower costs, we eliminated traditional gaming components such as high-end graphics and customisation. And to make the community feel safe, we incorporated steep privacy protections. To keep players involved, checking in and playing frequently, even for a few minutes, we added rewards that depend on how their alliance is doing and how often they connect to the game. This video game has been highly anticipated by our fans. With the talented Dunamis team of junior and senior programmers, designers, and system architects I now oversee, I was confident we were on track to produce this game as scheduled. Missing the Deadline When I crafted the first budget and milestone plan with input from the team, we expected the development of War Game to take ten members of our team twelve months, working full-time. As a safety precaution, we padded the total time needed by two months, which effectively gave us fourteen months to complete and launch the game. Despite the two-month padding, however, only a few months in I found I had to hire additional developers to keep on track. Whats worse, after a few months, five of my people dropped out. I naturally started getting nervous and had to quickly hire more developers. Yet in spite of the new hires, the following weeks proved to be a nightmare, with the team underperforming and yet another team member quitting. I didnt think I had underestimated the complexity of the project. The team had provided input into the project and everyone was on board regarding the timeline and resources needed. Yet something was not working out. As the team fell behind on the project timeline and team members left, I saw the need to cut some complex features, even though the final product would then likely disappoint some ardent fans. My team had to face an overlong crunch time, which led to bugs and high turnover, obliging me to spend far beyond budget hiring en masse to complete the task (while realising Id likely be letting many people go in the future to cut costs). On top of that, my team and I didnt inform the Marketing team that we had to cut some features. This resulted in an overpromising marketing campaign about the War Game experience that could well threaten the credibility of the game if our target media was disappointed by the scaled-back features, which could hurt sales and the important initial buzz that should occur when the game is launched. A Leadership Issue? Today, I had my weekly meeting with Mary Fraser, CEO of Dunamis. Over the past few weeks, she has been eager to see the progress of War Game. But today I can tell she is extremely worried about the delay and the quality of the game. It will be harmful to Dunamis if this game is less than a success, or worse, of course, a flop. And to be honest, I am worried about my position as Fraser recently expressed concerns about the quality of my leadership in my new role. During this meeting, she wanted to understand how my organisational issues could be fixed. John, your handling of the War Game project has a big impact on our brand image. Testers are unanimous: the pretest game as-is is on track to be a disappointment. Angry and frustrated testers even got vocal about it online, blaming the leadership of the company. Your team needs to patch all the bugs, add back the features that were cut, and finish this game. But I dont see how you can do that with your designers and developers leaving one after another and with the team largely underperforming. This situation is creating too much stress for everyone. What are you going to do to fix that? Id like to hear your thoughts. I could only agree with Fraser. The turnover rate on my team has always been high as in every team in this industry but I had indeed seen turnover increase in the past months and could tell that people were frustrated. I was wasting a lot of time hiring blindly, which was costly for the company, and it took time for newcomers to understand the project, which was delaying everything. I had also observed some disagreements between senior and junior developers which not only slowed things down but also demotivated people. However, I believed the major issue was the constant crunch time we have had to face over the past year. Most of my team members were either demotivated, burnt out, or simply leaving for greener pastures. Turning the Situation Around Getting the team to perform at the top of their game and fixing the turnover issue would be critical to properly finishing War Game in a reasonable time frame. But how could I fix something without knowing what was getting in the teams way? And how could I find the time to do that knowing that my plate was already too full? What was taking most of my time is what I would call dealing with administrative matters, which includes reporting, answering emails, attending meetings with my management...etc. On top of that, I was spending a large amount of time hiring developersand because of the time crunch and high turnover, I had been hiring them blindly too often. I also had to hire dozens of testers during the final phase of each project to identify bugs or playability problems. At the beginning of this project, I had asked my team to write a Game Design Document (GDD). This is part of the pre-production process which every video game company does. This document defines the project and its scope. It is a brief for the entire team that details the game mechanics, including visual aesthetics and audio choices before the prototyping phase. This document is also used to parcel out tasks among developers and designers. I had spent a lot of time reviewing the details of the GDD with team members so I could make final decisions for planning & budgeting. I spent only a little time coordinating with the Marketing team, but in regards to what happened, I believe I should have involved them earlier in the process and spend more time with them. As I had little free time to meet with my entire team, I could only organise a department meeting once every three months or so. This was not ideal, I know, but I could not dedicate more time for those meetings, nor ask my entire team to stop working for an hour every month as they wouldnt have the time. So, given the realities of my situation, how could I boost my teams engagement and performance and reduce the turnover rate? I have great people on my team. I knew I had been hiring left and right, but they were generally good hires. Given this team, we should be able to achieve our goal. So I needed to understand by hearing from them what I should do to help them succeed in achieving the target game and market results, and what I should stop doing that was getting in their way and preventing them from achieving those results. The Interview Results In my interview with the team, I managed to get the candid feedback I needed from them. At first they were a little reluctant to be fully transparent with me. But as they saw I wasnt defensive but instead was eager to hear what they had to say, they shared honest and insightful feedback. In my questions, I focused on what they thought I needed to stop doing, what I should do more or less of, and what I needed to start doing so they could achieve high impact. I believe their answers delivered a clear outline of my leadership and where it was falling short. Delivering the Results I presented my findings to Mary Fraser. Many interviewees commented that I spent too much time dealing with administrative matters and not enough trying to optimise processes within my team. I pushed for clarification about the team processes and discovered that employees felt I was wasting my time and theirs by asking for very detailed GDDs. They were already overwhelmed with their daily tasks and adding an administrative layer on top of that was counterproductive. The GDD took a lot of time for the developers to create and a lot of time for me to review. As this document is rarely updated during the projects life, while the video game design evolves all the time, my team believed it would have been more efficient to spend more time on the prototyping phase until the core mechanics and the fun factors were clear rather than developing a detailed, static document. Many developers suggested implementing feature lockdown dates, which would prevent additional changes in the features, reduce review cycles, and avoid iteration of the same tasks over and over. Some of the interviewees mentioned a lack of departmental organisation. A lot of comments were made to the effect that I should stop hiring developers blindly whenever there was a crunch time, as that often resulted in my hiring developers with the wrong skills or behaviour, making things worse for the team. The developers also felt that I was spending too much time hiring dozens of human testers when the game was in its final phase. It would have made more sense and lowered costs to simply incorporate unit testing, which is something that my team knows how to do. The team also said that I was not sharing enough information about the company with them, and communicated a wish for monthly department meetings where they could learn how the company was doing, get some regular updates on the company strategy, and maybe share some insights. In terms of organisational responsibility, almost all the senior developers, who have been working at Dunamis for years, said they would be willing to lead a team of newcomers and junior developers. Creating sub-teams with a smaller scope and a balance of experienced developers mentoring junior ones would help to decentralise decisions and match the right developer with the right task. Also, creating a hierarchy among the developers would reduce disagreements among them, create a better atmosphere in the team, and speed things up. Many comments came back about the project's time underestimation and marketing issues, and there were some good suggestions. Developers suggested building a knowledge base about past projects to better estimate future games. I agreed that this would help prevent major discrepancies between estimates and reality related to project cost and timing. They also suggested involving the marketing team early in the process to avoid miscommunication about the game. Fraser and I both found the results of these conversations eye-opening. The team provided fresh ideas, as well as identified the activities that took a lot of my time but added little to no value. Now, I have to turn those insights into concrete actions.

Questions:

1. Analyze leadership behavior of Kedge for this situation based on leadership strategyc courses.

2. Use Mintzberg strategies to articulate this situation and discuss what is the best strategy for this company.

3. From the interview results, identify the acts and activities that are not yet practiced by Kedge but could have a strong positive impact on his leadership if he starts doing them.

4. What are your recommendations to him from a leadership perspective. (4 recommendations).