Why am I making the Evil Interstellar Empire?

It’s about the way I’ve always wanted to learn new things #

Everyone has a different dominant way of learning. Some like to read textbooks; for others, the best way is to listen to academic lectures. Meanwhile, some prefer watching videos at home, and so on. There are plenty of online courses that can help you learn in all those ways.

But some people (like me) like to learn by doing. They like to first experience a problem, try to solve it, and figure out the right way by getting feedback. This is a different style of learning in the sense that it’s practical and highly interactive.

With this in mind, I wanted to create a great learning experience for someone like me.

So, I joined forces with another experienced manager who also happens to be my wife, and we started thinking about what a good learn-by-doing experience could look like. Our first thought was - why not train on the job? It’s certainly a great way to gain experience, but not always the safest or the fastest way.

The best way should simulate real situations, but it must be a safer, more playful experience. This is how we came to the idea of an interactive game. But what kind of game should it be?

• It should not require a lot of daily time investment.
  The reality of our everyday lives is that many of us can only learn “tussen de soep en de patatten” (quickly, between other things we have to do). So every game session should be a maximum of 20 minutes long to allow everyone to learn and play.

• But it should require commitment.
  I know how easy it is to procrastinate when it comes to learning (guess why 🙂). It’s best to have a rhythm if you want to study well. The game should not leave a lot of room for procrastination by giving assignments (“missions”) and checking the results often.

• It should work on a mobile phone.
  To make the 20-minute promise work, we had to reduce the preparation time to a minimum. This is why we decided that all game content must work on mobile phones, so you can play during your lunch break, on the bus or train, in a coffee bar - wherever and whenever you’d like.

We thought that the best fit would be a chat-driven game. As our chat solution, we’ve chosen Discord, the ideal platform to chat and play games. Also, Discord works on pretty much any hardware, so mobile support is automatically solved.

The Evil Interstellar Empire has many activities going on. As a result, next to project portfolio management, we will launch other content as well (so stay tuned :)).

Project portfolio management is not that difficult (and I’m tired of pretending it is) #

It always surprised me how a discipline so simple at its core, as portfolio management, has this aura of mystery and snobbery covering it so thickly.

Expensive corporate consultants pepper every conversation with complex industry terms and references, make fifty-page reports for top management and have a chart on every slide in their boardroom presentations. This highly-intimidating barrage of extremely good-looking but mostly useless bits of information is aimed at convincing everyone to hire more consultants to help with this complex and mysterious task.

The companies have learned that project portfolio management is complex, expensive, and only needed by the largest companies in the industry.

This makes me sad because nothing can be further from the truth.

Project portfolio management is simply about getting the most value from all your projects. It is about selecting and prioritizing to do the right things (aka Value management). It is about knowing what we can and cannot do (Capacity management). It is about being careful and sometimes taking risks (Risk management). And finally, it’s about talking to people about all these topics, getting their feedback, and improving (Stakeholder management, Continuous improvement).

Almost every organization needs this, given that they run many projects simultaneously.

What’s more, I’ve seen professionals doing project portfolio management (and often doing it quite well) without even realizing it. They had different job titles (like Team manager, Department manager, Product manager, IT business partner, or even Quality manager), but the common part was that they were made responsible for many projects, and they did their best to create a system to survive in the chaos and make the best job possible for their companies.

Thus, I want to give these people a way to improve their skills and knowledge and become better at what they do.

It’s not fully ready, but you can preview it today.

We are still in the making of the Evil Interstellar Empire. There is still a lot to do - design the game experience, write all the missions’ content, test and rework.

But you can already experience EvIE by trying two missions we’ve provided you as a preview. There’s no registration required, no sign-up bs, and no Next-Next-Finish wizards - just crack cases and have fun.