November 2025 Member of the Month: Eric Guay
Every month, NASAGA highlights one of its members who is doing fantastic things. November’s Member of the Month is NASAGA Board Member Eric Guay, PMP/CSM, author of Critical Success: Using RPG Tactics for Project Victory.
What kind of work do you do?
I’m the director of integration for Harrington Process Solutions. When we intend to purchase a company, I work to streamline the integration process of that purchase. What are the right questions for us to ask? How do we support the people leading that integration process? What do we do to integrate their systems into ours, like Human Resources (HR), Information Technology (IT), Marketing, etc. It’s all about supporting them. There’s a huge project management component to track the risks, issues, and synergies of that effort. Bottom line: Are we getting what we expected from this purchase? And if not, what can we do to rectify that?
There’s a huge correlation between a Game Master in a role-playing session and being a Project Manager of a project team. Everyone in both has a role to play. You have to give them the background and set the scene, and then let the players play their roles. Imagine the Thief trying to cast spells…you don’t want HR people focused on marketing tasks. You want to align the tasks and actions to their strengths. There’s so much crossover with gaming!
Why are you a NASAGA member?
I had written my book, but hadn't published it yet. I was looking for venues and audiences where it would best fit. I believe the ideal audience for the book is tech centric folks who have played fantasy role playing games including Dungeons and Dragons (DnD). If I could really narrow it down to a specific niche, that’s who it’s aimed at. But the Venn diagram crossover of Gaming and Project Management is getting bigger all the time. Professional gamers are more common these days, but that didn’t exist when I was starting out! I had no idea that there were professional associations focusing on gaming. I really wanted to find people like me, and I started finding pockets like NASAGA. I reached out to the chair email account, not knowing who I was reaching out to. Lisa responded and we started talking. She is located in the area I grew up in (southeast Massachusetts) and we connected over that and our passion for games immediately. We hit it off from day one and she asked me to be on the NASAGA Board.
As a brand new member of NASAGA, what are you most looking forward to?
I wanted to go to NASAGA 2025, but having just started this summer at Harrington, I couldn’t take the time off. I did go to Joe Lasley’s LeadRPG weekend-long seminar in Portland, Maine, this summer. It was great! I promised Alex I would be at Rochester for NASAGA 2026. At that event, I’m most looking forward to interacting with people well versed in gaming. I’ve been playing DnD since 1987, and I’m excited to meet people with similar deep experience. It’s fun to direct people in games, but it’s equally fun to have a bunch of equals where you all have the same breadth and depth of knowledge. Bottom line: I’m looking forward to being connected to folks who love what I love.
NASAGA’s theme for the 2025 Conference was “A Path to Playful Learning.” What does “Playful Learning” look like in your space?
This is a really interesting contrast between my current company and my previous one. My previous work for 20 years was at Ferguson Enterprises on the East Coast, which was a pretty conservative company. Harrington is on the West Coast, and while it’s still an industrial company, it’s a little more light hearted. That makes the team a little more interactive, more willing to embrace bottom-up and collaborative scenarios as opposed to top-down direction. It creates a lot more back and forth, more banter. That’s especially important given how widespread remote work is; it’s just not the same as being in person, so having the ability to get people to open up is great. That’s the playful learning piece: people start to open up and build trust. It takes a little while, but it’s worth it.
