Agile at Scale for Game Studios

🎮 Purpose

Many games teams already have a level of agile maturity and can operate well on a fortnightly rhythm.  How do we take this to the next level so that multiple teams can plan, collaborate and deliver together on longer timeframes like games milestones?
Assuming we have a team level vision of a game:

• How do we reduce the delta between the aspirational big picture (“this is going to be awesome!”) and the reality of what we can deliver?
• How do we get out of the fighting fires view and into the forest view?
• Also, how do we connect the vision for the game and revenue targets?
• Are you frustrated that your Gantt Chart is always out of date?

If you’ve ever asked any of these questions, Agile at Scale for Games Studios may be for you!

🔍 What is it and what isn't it

Agile at Scale for Games Studios is an approach designed specifically for the games industry as part of a collaboration between Organa and Playside Studios:

• Playside is an award-winning game studio, the largest in Australia, and an agile-first great place to work with a culture and mindset of learning and improvement
• Organa are a boutique advisory firm that do everything from coaching teams in Agile ways of working, to completely redesigning how organisations are structured, to creating entirely new product strategies

The combined experience synergizes to create a way multiple games development teams can work at scale in agile ways to achieve a higher level of planning, collaboration and delivery to make great games together more successfully.

It’s a culmination of how agile and scaled agile success patterns when applied to specific games challenges and the reality of games development leads to a fit-for-purpose approach.

It isn’t:

• A generic Agile/Scrum course or Scrum Master certification 
• A “cookie-cutter” or “one size fits all” templated playbook
• A prescriptive, “thou shalt, thou must” set of instructions to be followed blindly

In summary, it’s what decades of first hand experience in modern ways of working at scale used to make great games looks like distilled down to its most powerful essence.

👾 Structure

Agile at Scale for Games Studios is typically introduced using the following pattern:

• A 2-day training program, delivered either virtually or face-to-face, to the teams and leaders working together on a game.  This provides the mutual foundation and understanding needed for games to be made in this way.
• A 1-day guided workshop, to put the learnings from the training program into practice, where everyone is supported to have the conversations and setup the structures they will need, plan their first milestone, collaboratively handle risks and dependencies, make critical decisions, visualise all of this, and establish their confidence that they can deliver on it
• An (optional) follow-on coaching retainer arrangement, whereby the teams and leaders have on-demand access to an experienced coach who knows their people and how they work, can answer questions, provide guidance and if requested, continue to assist with future milestone planning sessions or other events.

While we recommend this pattern as we find it most successful, we operate in an agile way too, so we’re happy to customize both the content and the introduction pattern for you, to make sure it works the best for you.

🎓 Learning Objectives

Adopting this way of working, leaders and teams will be able to:

• Establish a shared vision, creating a common understanding of the game's goals and future direction, fostering collaboration and alignment among all stakeholders

• Use a light-weight method of negotiating/planning the big picture to plan and define milestones in ways that provide transparency and visibility to leaders, and empower the teams to co-create and own longer term plans than just sprints
• Gain practical experience in using milestone planning to match demand to capacity and use prioritisation to solve scope vs capacity challenges 
• Understand the pre-planning activities required for a successful milestone planning session, and how to ensure they continue to improve each time
• Connect the program board (strategic layer) to the team board/sprint cycle (delivery layer)
• Use product review best practices - who, when, where and how to integrate it into development cycle with minimal disruption 
• Know how this informs the traditional waterfall-style roadmap output (often needed for stakeholder reporting)
• Enables vision-carriers, designers, and creative directors to have a faster, more negotiable way to get what you want

If you’d like to know more, talk to us about how Agile at Scale for Games Studios might help you!

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