End of Month 7

I've worked on a lot of projects over the years.  I tend to join, then take over control of some part of the project.  I take it in directions beyond the scope and understanding of the managers above me, though they do tend to really appreciate my work.  Eventually, managers, due to their lack of understanding as to what I'm doing, will change something that fundamentally causes my work to break down.  I can remember times I've tried to explain why their overriding of my work will hurt the project.  That's when they bust out with the, "This is my project, and I want it done like this," and the discussion is over.  I leave the project and, in many cases, burn all bridges behind me thinking about what an idiot the guy was.

Now I'm the manager on a project.  The project has grown beyond the scope of what one person could be in charge of all the details for, creating a need for team leads to be in charge of sections of it.  I mean, I know what the programmers are doing, but I couldn't break it down much further than that.  For example, I thought the designation of character animation associations should go with the abilities class, not the weapon class.  The animations should be associated with the abilities since different abilities will have different animations, even if they use the same weapon.  The programmer team lead disagrees with me on this, because he feels tying animations with the weapon class(something that will be loaded in memory at all times), will send less server calls then if done my way.  I don't agree with that.  In the end, will it really matter? Is it worth making an issue out of it?  He knows the engine a thousand times better than I do.  Might he know more about the situation and he's just not articulating his reasoning well?

There was a problem that happened at the last art meeting, so I changed a policy to prevent it from happening again, and reassigned one of the artists to a different task.  Well, turns out it was a misunderstanding, and it wasn't really a problem after all.  That means my "solution" messes up something, and that artist needs to be assigned back to what she was doing originally.  I superseded what my art team leads had set up when it turned out, I should have left it alone.

Now everything I'm saying here is really, really minor.  But do you get what I'm doing?  I'm doing the same crap to my team leads as idiot project managers have done to me.  They understand what's going on in their piece of the puzzle better than I do, and I have to accept that and trust them.