Favro for
Game Development
I’ve been in and around game development for more than a decade, both developing games as a producer working with AAA teams, and visiting game studios around the world as an Agile Coach. Over the years, just as game technology, platforms, and business models have drastically changed, so has the process of game development likewise evolved. Today’s empowered, cross-functional, oftentimes distributed teams want collaboration tools that are as flexible and organic as they are. Favro embodies this new way of working, promoting team autonomy, while, at the same time, providing large project and studio alignment.
Setting up Favro for game development is easier than you’d expect. Let me walk you through it from creating your organization via collections to team boards and backlogs to overview reports and roll-up dashboards. You’ll soon see why Ulas Karademir, Director of Core Technology and Operations at Unity says, “Favro makes project management fun for us.”
When you first begin to set up your studio in Favro, the Collection browser is a good place to start. This is where you map your organization to the tool. Think of a Collection as a smaller domain (team/department) within an overall kingdom (studio). Each team, whether it be a feature team, art asset team, engine team, tools team, etc., should have its own collection, empowering them to work the way they choose. Building up through the organization, each project should also have its own collection, aggregating all of the project teams.
Depending on the size of your studio, you may also want to have discipline-specific department collections and maybe even IP specific collections. Ultimately, at the top, a studio portfolio collection can show the big picture, with shared backlogs and boards from other collections.
The Team Lead or Scrum Master for each team should be the owner of each team’s collection. This empowers them to create whatever workflow boards and backlogs the team members deem necessary, and, if need be, enable any required workflow rules and integrations. Boards can be configured to match their current way of working, whether it be Scrum, Kanban, or a unique method. Feature and art asset backlogs can dynamically be created for the team or shared from an overall project collection.
The easiest place to start is with one of these team-specific templates. Boards can also be imported from Trello, BaseCamp, or CSV. Of course, you can also start from scratch. All of these options can be accessed from the “+” icon in the top left corner. If you want to enable integration to another tool the team currently uses or need more power on a board, simply click the board menu -> More -> Integrations and API.
Team autonomy and empowerment are essential, but everyone still needs to see the big picture, track progress, and establish predictability. Thanks to Favro’s backlog/board sharing capabilities across multiple collections, card relations and advanced, built-in reporting, overview and alignment are seamlessly achieved.
Both backlogs and boards can be shared to a project level dashboard collection, aggregating all of the contributing teams’ progress. To do this, click on any backlog/board’s menu and select “Options > Add or move to another collection”. Once shared to a project level collection, the real-time status of any feature or asset can be seen via the card’s relations, without having to drill down to the team level.
In tandem with project dashboard collections, Favro’s reports provide a powerful way to filter down to exactly what you want to see, across all collections, boards, and backlogs. Whether you’re looking for a team, project, or studio portfolio status completion overview, the reporting app shows the details and at a glance visualizations of progress.
That’s it! You now have the foundation for setting up Favro for your entire game studio. Your teams will have the flexibility and ease-of-use they crave, letting them focus on making games. Producers, development directors, and department heads will be able to establish multi-team alignment while tracking overall progress and making course corrections in real-time. Studio leadership can see it all at a high level and answer questions themselves, without having to disturb team momentum. There’s no time like the present to make it happen with Favro!
