Operational Realignment

SITUATION

An electronic entertainment company that creates visually stimulating games for mobile devices created a multi-player digital trading card game that had a wide following.

As the game gained popularity, the company struggled with significant quality and stability issues – problems that grew severe because of inadequate internal processes and weak coordination between internal cross-functional teams. Although the company had a group of creative artists and talented engineers, there was a lack of accountability that threatened the company’s success.

There was no time to pause ongoing game development for an extended review. But given that existing processes were not effective and deadlines continued to slip, the game company’s board of directors hired Digital Foundry to perform an assessment designed to solve these quality and production challenges.

SOLUTION

Digital Foundry recommended a current state assessment of company operations. This initiative was designed to provide actionable short-, medium-, and long-term recommendations for improving processes and integrating functional teams more effectively.

To solve these issues as quickly as possible, we performed cross-functional stakeholder interviews, conducted an in-depth analysis of the operational processes, and mapped those processes against industry best practices. Our Report of Findings summarized our assessment with specific, actionable recommendations to address critical breakpoints that had been identified and socialized with the stakeholder group. The findings and recommendations were focused on several fundamental areas of the organization, including: process, communication, implementation, quality assurance, deployment, and site maintenance.

RESULTS

While investigating and documenting the game company’s processes, Digital Foundry helped our client:

• Make quick and highly effective changes that reflected the dynamics of the corporate culture and encouraged engineers and artists to be aligned with common goals.

• Help technology experts, story writers, and artists understand each other’s roles in launching and managing complex multi-player games.

• Implement processes that map more closely to industry best practices to better support development of successful new games.