I am Jon Leslie, and RAFT is what came out of watching schedules disappear into the same place from both sides of the table.
I spent my first decade inside the problem, producing at Xbox, 2K, EA and Harmonix. Rock Band, The Sims, Tiger Woods PGA Tour, Amped. On Amped 3, Microsoft sold the studio to 2K halfway through production, so the game shipped under a different publisher than the one that greenlit it. I know what the last twelve weeks before gold feels like from the inside, and I know that nobody in that room lacked skill or cared too little. What we lacked was an accurate picture of the schedule early enough to do anything cheap about it.
I spent the fifteen years after that on the other side. I opened Hansoft’s North American office and later helped scale Favro from nothing to more than two thousand game and enterprise customers, and I spent most of that time on the road, in studios, helping teams work more iteratively and predictably. That is the part that matters here. One producer sees the studios they worked at. I have sat in many of them, in many countries, and the same waste is in the same place every time. It is not a culture problem local to your building.
Those fifteen years also taught me what production tools are genuinely good at, which is recording work that happened, and what they are structurally bad at, which is showing you the time nobody recorded. A tracker logs work, and a wait leaves nothing to log.
RAFT is the method I built for teams whose deliverables cross several disciplines before they are done. The Flow Diagnostic is the two-week engagement that finds and prices the waiting your tools were never built to record. I built both because I needed them on nine shipped titles and didn’t have them.
I produced games for ten years and then spent fifteen more visiting studios around the world, sitting in their production rooms and looking at their boards. The same waste turns up everywhere, and it is nobody’s fault. Good people lose weeks to gaps that no system was ever built to show them, and the cost of those gaps lands on their evenings and their weekends.
What I want is narrow enough to say plainly. I want studios to find out sooner when a direction is wrong, so the correction costs days instead of months. I want the time that disappears between disciplines to stop being invisible and start being a number somebody can act on. And I want fewer developers paying that cost for a schedule problem that was visible months earlier and that nobody could see. Crunch is not a passion problem, and it is not a culture problem. It is arithmetic, and arithmetic can be shown to people early enough to matter.
I do not ask a studio to change anything before I have shown it a number. The diagnostic is read only. Your tracker, no process change, nothing to adopt, nobody sitting in a workshop. Only after that, and only if the number turns out to be worth acting on, is there a conversation about doing anything differently.
When that conversation happens, it is narrow. Two seams, the two the measurement said were costing the most, That is the RAFT Flow Sprint. Nobody converts to anything, and nobody learns a vocabulary before it pays for itself. If a recommendation of mine needs your studio to become something else first, it is a bad recommendation, and I will not make it.
RAFT and the underlying instrument are supported by an MTI Business Innovation grant, and the technology behind the diagnostic is the subject of a filed provisional patent application. I’ve trained over a thousand practitioners in parallel flow. I co-chair the Agile Product Management Initiative run jointly by the Project Management Institute and the Agile Alliance.
