SQUADRON 42

Squadron 42 much like Star Citizen was experiencing multiple issues with development deadlines, priortization, and an overwhelmingly large backlog. Additionally, Producers and their development teams each had their own flavor and approach to "how" they wanted to work. This led to significant reporting discrepancies, inconsistent updates, misalignment of initiatives, and crossed communication regarding feature delivery. Additionally, development teams, game designers, SFX, VFX, Character Art, and Vehicles teams all had different expectations on how each role should interact and engage. Executive leadership struggled to understand where teams were at in their development pipeline, and the overall level of completion of their Sagas, Epics, and Tasks. A large volume of work assigned to Star Citizen was being conflated by work assigned to Squadron 42 project. Both projects were being developed in a single Jira instance, with little product management structure or adherence to "software delivery life cycle"(SDLC) and "game development life cycle" (GDLC. My responsibility was to separate the Squadron 42 IP from Star Citizen IP. My team and I began by establishing a product development structure leveraging SAFe 5.1 framework as the baseline solution. We began by creating a "use case" articulating the problem with developing individual products under a single Jira project instance. We met with executive leadership to gain approval to move forward with a complete overhaul of our project management tools and their structure for all of development. My team and I identified all of the key stakeholders for Star Citizen and Squadron 42 dev teams. We leveraged "use case" data from multiple game companies (Bungie, Electronic Arts) as well as an approach discussed during GDC from Ubisoft. After gaining approval, we began analyzing our Jira project instance to discover that 435,000 issues had been created over the last 10 years of development for Star Citizen and Squadron 42. Much of these issues shared labels, copies of labels, and tags. Additionally, workflows were misconfigured and internal development tools thought to be functioning on the backend were failing. Teams weren't being notified, and were unware of the breakdown for nearly a year and half. Furthermore, development tools were so engrained in the current instance that any changes to process caused outages for days at a time. We took this information to all of the key stakeholders to identify SMEs for both projects, and SMEs for the internal dev tools. We mapped every software and tool that was integrated with a dev tool and or our existing Jira project. I worked with Directors, Producers, and Leads to identify risks associated to each tool and application used within Star Citizen dev eco-system and Squadron 42 eco-system. Process and solution: • Analyzed Squadron 42 and Star Citizen Jira Project • Consolidated information for a proposal to executive leadership • Presented the 'Use Case' to executive leadership to gain approval • Identified software and internal dev tools integrated with Jira project • Identified list of SMEs and sphere of influence for each app and internal dev tool • Worked with SMEs, Producers, and Directors to write requirements for Squadron 42, Star Citizen, Jira, and internal dev tools • Established multiple solutions and approaches to achieve objective • Established a company wide meeting with Producers, Pillar Producers, Lead Producers, Directors, Executive Leadership, and C-suite Leadership to present the problem and the solution for awareness • Facilitated the breakdown of work based on SME, and development team leveraging software and dev tools associated to Jira • Engaged SMEs and individual contributors to establish deadlines and estimated time to completion • Created a risk register based on breakdown and impact to projects • Established regular cadence for updates with all stakeholders • Established key performance indicators to ensure that teams were meeting their commitments throughtout the separation of the products • Implemented an "office hours" making myself and my team readily available for support to all stakeholders and individual contributors • Performed a post-mortem to gain feedback from stakeholders, leads, and producers