Summary
A computer games company uses a range of standards to codify “best-practice”
The problem
The company is a start-up company in the notoriously informal games sector and directors and investors wanted to protect their investment and the intellectual property being developed by using a range of prestigious and international standards as a benchmark.
The client
The client is a 25-person start-up Games company in the first round of funding. The directors all have previous games company experience with prestigious names from the industry and the external investors are committed to the games sector.
The approach and the solution
The company was one of first to adopt the idea of creating library of software “components” that could be used for different games and applications.
The directors wanted to bring a degree of structure and order to the sometimes overly informal world of games company processes.
Games company codifies “best-practice”
As such, they were looking to undertake a diagnostic that would result in a plan to codify the practices employed so that they could “hand-on-heart” demonstrate that they were a significant step ahead of the competition…”nothing was out of bounds”.
The ambition was to create a management system that incorporated company best practice as well as meeting the requirements of a range of prestigious internationally recognised standards. A small sample of the key aspects the management system needed to address included:
• Robustly linking development objectives and targets to revenue streams and the operational plan
• The development of robust systems that would protect the company’s intellectual property, this included:
o Initial recruitment and ongoing vetting systems
o IT infrastructure systems
o The protection of IP
The objective was to create a “book of best operational practice” that reflected the way in which the company worked and also met the requirements of:
The quality management system standard, ISO 9001The environmental management system standard, ISO 14001The health and safety management system standard, OHSAS 18001The information security management system standard, ISO 27001 andInvestors in People
The core of the diagnostic saw the current structures and systems evaluated against the above standards and in excess of 50% of the staff were consulted in order to both gain consensus and to create ‘buy in’ for the implementation phase.
The outcome
Employing the approach advised led to the following:
• A fully costed route-map of the way forward identifying activities, timescales and responsibilities
• Staff engaged and excited around the objectives of the company and the proposition to systematise processes
• A draft Core Activity Map™ of the current processes showing how the work works and linked to process KPI’s
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