White Collar is a “funny” serious game that tries to simulate the day-to-day of a Consulting firm. On the one hand, we have the people that you might hire, teach and then assign to a project with other people, thus composing the teams. On the other hand, consulting firms make their life doing projects. There are two types of projects: public and private. Both have the same overall characteristics but the main differences are regulatory issues and payment dates, among others.
Each company in the game will be a consultancy within a specific sector, such as IT, logistics, legal, chemical business and so on. They will compete inside a growing economy with many potential customers that will need (and pay for) projects.
People will be autonomous. They will have some attributes and some needs that will be pre-fixed but that could change depending on the pressure of the daily work, office environment, personal situation, team dynamics and many other factors.
Teams will be made when people are assigned to a project. In a team there will be different roles. The roles will be common, such as project manager role, or business-specific such as developer, forensic specialist, legal advisor, depending on the sector that the company is working on.
Projects are the result of a proposal. The companies compete against each other when companies publish a Request for Proposal (RFP). The negotiation ends with a winner company that will be assigned a project. People are then assigned to the project and a project team is built. They will perform their daily work with more or less diligence, until the project is hopefully finished.
We are also a team and our characteristics will also change during this project. You can follow our daily adventures in this project at our Twitter page or this blog (if you are so eager to know about us you can subscribe to our blog RSS feed here). Unlike our game characters (which are generated dynamically as needed), we have a fixed background.
Edin Kapić is an IT consultant specialized in Microsoft technologies. He holds a B.Sc. in Computer Science Engineering by Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (Barcelona). When not managing projects, he can be found contributing to several open-source projects at CodePlex , moderating the official SharePoint Development Forum in Spanish or running a Catalan SharePoint User Group (SUG.CAT). In the present he is expected to be coding the White Collar game and follow the way of the startup.
Vanessa Estorach Cavaller is an intra-entrepreneur since she finished her Business Administration degree in Esade Business School (Barcelona). She has developed the Exports department of a production firm and, at the present, you can find her in a social company as a Marketing specialist. In her free time you can find her with other Esade Alumni working as a volunteer consultant in comunity projects.
