Colossus on clay feet. Principles for managing a fast-paced gaming studio

It often seems that a solid team of professionals, a strong and high-quality product is on the way, a thick investment cushion of financial security, and something is wrong. Moreover, with each week of these "something" is becoming more and more. Employees are nervous, a huge amount of work takes place in overtime mode, constant interruptions in internal communications, the search for those responsible and guilty - many fathers have victory, defeat is always an orphan. Such a destructive studio development scenario is a slow but sure way to complete its activities. But we didn’t just come together a few months ago?

A large number of startups "go the distance" precisely because at some point they cannot properly plan and control their scaling. Any organization as a living organism. The lack of development directly indicates a slow but sure dying. The paradox is that rapid and uncontrolled growth can lead to the opposite of the desired result. After a while, the company becomes a colossus with feet of clay. The feeling that everything can collapse from the slightest whiff of the breeze, changes in market conditions or even any global processes of optimism does not add at all. Nervousness, stress, squabbles, drop in productivity as a result.
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In this article we will try to describe our experience in overcoming this kind of situation. It was damn not easy, but we dealt with it.

Story

The company Room 8 appeared in the spring of 2012. Classics of the genre. The great desire to create games for mobile devices rallied several like-minded people, each of whom had absolutely no experience with the industry in which the newly created company was going to carry out its activities.

The business model involved building a full-fledged game development studio. The plans were to produce 5-6 high-quality games per year. The booming growth of the mobile gaming industry has given hope that the main risks are balanced, and the potential for further growth and development is high. In aggregate, both of these factors attracted the attention of the venture capital firm VostokVentures and the Studio 8 studio agreed on investment support.

After receiving the investment, the studio begins to grow rapidly. The departments of development, testing, design, game design and marketing are significantly strengthened. In just two months, the state grows from 7 to 30 people. Three months later, the studio has 60 employees. After five months from its inception, the company represented a motley bunch of a motley team with a huge number of newly identified problems.

Fires

As we mentioned above, rapid growth has led to a number of global problems, each of which was vainly tried to solve by this or that employee alone. In addition to (solvable) development problems, management issues also “burned”. Historically, the project management function was assigned to GameDesigner, which had to combine it with its main activity - product development from the point of view of game design. The coordinating actions of the group of founders were hampered by lack of coherence, lack of experience and inability to manage each other’s expectations. This was aggravated by overloading overtime and communication problems. At that time, the organizational structure looked like this:



Typical image for one project

Let's try to understand the shortcomings of this structure:

• Powers and responsibilities. On the one hand, the game designer is personally responsible for the game being created. On the other hand, directors have the authority to manage members of the project team. In practice, it turns out that the decision making freedom of a gamediz is limited. This state of affairs leads to a dilution of responsibility - sooner or later one of the directors was involved in any “hot” discussions.
• Accessibility and communication. The scheme is also complicated by the fact that a large number of people are involved in project management, many of whom are involved in several projects at once.
• Conflict of interest. Game Designer combined product responsibility (you need to create the best product!) And project design (constant search for the best ways to create a product). Thus, the game designer was in a permanent state of internal contradiction. On the one hand, the quality and sense of beauty, and on the other - time, deadline and profitability.
• Errors in the prioritization. The rapidly grown structure is difficult to manage. Often the multidirectional pressure on the game designer gradually led him to conflicting decisions. The way a game designer imagined a product often differed from the picture of the world of other project participants. From here failures in communications, conflicts and a huge number of negative feedback.

It should be noted that one characteristic property (albeit a rapidly grown) startup still played on our side. We mean flexibility. Yes, the repair and updating of the company's structure took almost half a year. Yes, I had to overcome the problems of its participants. Agree, make compromises and negotiate again. But at the moment we are much more like a streamlined and complete mechanism working on agile principles than a couple of hundred days ago. I want to believe that all the perturbations of the last six months will allow us to produce even better products. But first things first.

How we put out the fire

Being a participant in the process, it is extremely difficult to influence its principles and its logic. The risk of self-change management system is very high. If from the very beginning the management of the company made mistakes in the organization of the management system, then where is the guarantee that having done a lot of serious work on the errors, we will not get a similar result?

To reduce this risk, we took a step that was somewhat unusual for many domestic startups. Namely, a man was invited from outside. Knowledge of the principles of building a management system in conjunction with the position of this specialist “above” processes inspired certain hopes. We were completely open to any ideas and suggestions, and these ideas were voiced. In fact, we invested in strengthening our own organization, and after utilization of start-up enthusiasm, the studio opened a second wind.

Who is this man from the side?

There is a misconception that venture capital companies do not give a startup anything other than money. This is not at all true, if only because money does not “give”, but “invest”. Our "business angels", of course, were absolutely not interested in us being bent after some time. Expert advice, contact details of potential business consultants, moral support - we all got this from our venture capital investor.

What have we done?

We started from the top - with the Board of Directors. Priorities were determined in the importance of a project, the amount of resources that we are ready to direct was revised. In the picture it looks like this:



The priorities of the projects were determined depending on the prospects. Naturally, everything can not be the most important. Occam's razor is a simple question: “if we have the opportunity to make only one game, which one will we choose to develop?” The choice, it should be noted, is so-so. Which of my children will be having dinner tonight? Hard, not comfortable, but necessary.

Resource allocation. After a complex arrangement of emphasis among existing projects, there was a distribution of resources. It is clear that more important projects should receive the strongest people in the team and, of course, more attention. After the introduction of this simple principle, the constant practice of daily redeployment of staff has been completed. All were not grabbing at the most important project, but at the one that burned the brightest of all.

After establishing order “at the top”, the next step was the introduction of SCRUM . As part of the first wave, we have implemented only some elements of this system. Those elements that were supposed to lead to the desired result as quickly as possible. This is a daily standups and iteration demo.

Daily Standups. Every day, the project team met, and each answered three simple questions: What did you do yesterday? (pride) What problems did you encounter? (please help) What will you do today? (promise) This simple innovation has helped teams improve communication effectiveness. Suppose that Scrum Board did not immediately catch on, but the stand-ups noticeably increased the coordination and understanding of the project. For example, suddenly it came to the realization that you can find out about the backlog not on Friday evening, but on Tuesday morning.

Iteration Demo clearly demonstrates the state of the stages and components of the product being developed. The introduction of this element made it possible to establish communication at the team-leadership level. Involvement in the project and awareness of its condition significantly increased transparency and, thus, reduced overall nervousness.

Why do problems arise again?

After the first three months of the studio, we found that problems that have already been resolved often reappear. Moreover, similar problems could arise as with the same people, and on different projects. The reason turned out to be quite trivial: ragged attention to a particular project retarded the development of each of them. Although a small but unplanned pause in the development of the project is a clear step back.

The search for a tool that would allow to support the process of continuous development did not take much time. First of all, we wanted to go to another level of planning. We decided to test the practice of iterative quality assurance of the company. It looks like this:

1. A group of directors develops a set of qualitative criteria for each department (engineering, testing, art, game design), the observance of which, by default, determines the entire process of work qualitative and effective. Criteria might look something like this:

Engineering: Coding Style, Code Review, Refactoring

Testing: Co-Location with Engineering Team, Test Cases, Defect Metrics, Feature Metrics

Art: design repository ... etc.

2. Then, once a month, the process of evaluating each project according to the developed criteria is carried out. Qualitative-numerical metrics look like this:



Or like this, if you are interested in details:



3. Next, the heads of departments analyze the resulting picture of reality. First of all - red zones in problem projects. The analysis should give answers to two main questions: why did this happen and what should be done to change the picture for the next meeting.

4. After 1-2 months, the picture describing what is happening stabilizes. That is, almost all project components are gradually moving into the green zone. This does not mean that now everything will be fine (the project is developing!), It is simply time to develop new criteria and repeat steps 1-3, effectively driving projects into the red zone.

The meaning of this tool is not that the chart is always green, but that the company develops without any “kicks” from the side, using only internal resources.

How not to overdo business analysis

There was an attempt to improve the situation with project management by implementing the SCRUM system. But the more we “pressed” on this system, the worse it became with game design. Conversely, when game design was obtained, compliance with the principles of SCRUM sagged. As a result of a small analysis, the main cause of the SCRUM vs GameDesign conflict was revealed - it turned out to be the same internal conflict of interests of the employee who combined the functions of the project manager and game designer. The only way out, as we decided, is to change the organizational structure. In particular, all managerial functions were removed from game designers by a strong-willed decision — let them do what they do best, we thought. But someone should manage the project? To manage each project, a new role was introduced - the project coordinator.

As a result, we got the following structure:

Conclusion We invented Lean Management

Having overcome the path of SCRUM implementation, we found solutions to all the problems that the company faced a year ago. Moreover, difficulties arose not only in the process of overcoming, but also in questions of choosing the direction of movement. Naturally, we are fully aware that the development of the company is a continuous thing. You can not wake up once, say: "Everything. My company has evolved. ” We understand that we have to go through countless paths and forks, but, as they say, "The road will be mastered by walking." We will continue to look for new problems, formulate their descriptions, look for methods to solve them, and improve everything that is not improved.

The answer to the question of the state of the company is not in assessing the ideality of the processes, but in the ability to change them quickly in the context of the changing situation in the industry and in the market as a whole. To act otherwise will not work. You need to constantly search and find what helps not only start-ups to survive, but also turn them into a modern, young in spirit and effective business.