Producing four educational projects with UNICEF Kazakhstan

Between 2022 and now, the KBTU GameLab delivered four consecutive educational projects in partnership with UNICEF Kazakhstan. Back-to-back, different scopes, same partner, one producer on our side (me). Here's what repeatedly mattered.

Requirements capture

UNICEF projects come with carefully written requirements. Half of producing is reading them with the right attention. The reason to do that properly is that the version you think you heard in the kick-off call is subtly different from the version in the signed document, and the one in the document is the one the delivery will be judged against. Read, reconcile, confirm in writing, then build.

Timelines

Partner-funded projects run on partner timelines. If the partner's reporting cycle wants a milestone in September, September is a hard date, not a soft one. The way I handle this is to keep a visible ladder of checkpoints that ladder up to the hard dates, so the team has weekly feedback about whether we're tracking — not just a panicked conversation two weeks out.

Four in a row

The first project of four is where the relationship forms. By project three, both sides know how the other works — what shape a brief should take on their end, what they can expect from you on ours. That compounds: the fourth project moved faster than the first by a surprising margin, not because we were faster at making the thing, but because the back-and-forth on scope went from weeks to days.

What I'd tell a new producer

Optimise for being boring. Partner-funded educational work rewards a team that's dependable more than a team that's brilliant in bursts. Nobody at UNICEF is going to remember the clever thing you did in month two if the final deliverable slipped by a month. They will, however, remember that you hit a date four times in a row.