How Hive Helps This Gaming Team Focus On Improving Player Experience
The Inside Scoop: It’s All About The Players
If you’ve ever played video games, you’ve likely formed a bond to the game itself, or to the company that produced it. But have you ever taken a minute to think about the people and processes behind the scenes who are responsible for building that sense of connection? We have, because hundreds of employees at a leading gaming company use Hive to do just that.
These employees are part of a special Customer Experience team that focuses on optimizing the player experience. The team not only helps players when they have questions, but it makes players feel connected to the company and people behind the games, ultimately building this company-player relationship on a larger scale.
One company that Hive has helped improve player experience has hundreds of employees using Hive today. This group is part of a special team within the company, which aims to help players have the most enjoyable experience with its product: games. The team not only helps players when they are having problems but also connects players to games, helping to grow the relationship on a larger scale.
If you’ve ever played video games, you’ve likely formed some type of bond to the game and to the company that produced it. But what if you took a minute to think about the people and processes that work behind the scenes to solve problems and help build that sense of connection? That’s where hundreds of employees at a leading gaming company are using Hive.
These employees are part of a special team within the company, which aims to help players have the most enjoyable experience with its product: games. The team not only helps players when they are having problems but also connects players to games, helping to grow the relationship on a larger scale.
This team focuses on minimizing friction and improving the overall player experience – yet internally, its operations had room for improvement. With work spread across too many tools, their inefficient processes were hindering collaboration and ultimately wasting time.
How could these Customer Experience professionals connect with their customers, the players – and help them have the best experience possible – while their own work setup was less than optimal? It was clear the team needed a solution to help employees work more effectively, in turn freeing up more time and energy to focus on their ultimate goal: building player relationships with the larger company.
The Need For One Central Workspace
When the company began to search for a new solution, it was using at least six different productivity tools across the department. Each team was given the freedom to choose its own tool(s), which eventually led to projects being spread across Planview, Asana, Trello, Microsoft Teams, Project Place, and Excel Spreadsheets. Each team appreciated the ability to work within its chosen platform, but the negatives were beginning to outweigh the positives.
Managing work in all of these productivity tools was not only confusing, but it also created information silos across the organization. Teams struggled to connect related processes and found themselves repeating unnecessary tasks.
So when the company team set out to find a solution, they approached tools with the following challenges in mind:
- Why are we feeling the frustration of not being able to work together?
- Where are the barriers to us being able to collaborate?
- How can we be running this sequence of events more effectively?
- Why are we doing redundant things from one step to the next?
Choosing Hive: One Tool, So Much Flexibility
The company knew it needed to migrate everyone onto one platform to maximize collaboration and efficiency across the team. So what made them choose Hive?
When they began the search for its one-size-fits-all project management tool, they set up trials with a handful of the leading industry options. Different teams had varying levels of experience and project management needs, so they wanted a tool that had the rigor of a robust Project Portfolio Management (PPM) software, but wasn’t too heavy or complicated.
The company was looking for an easier way to get things done, track tasks, and work collectively as a team. So what stood out about Hive?
1. Flexibility
If the team was going to convince everyone to move to one single platform, it needed a tool that would let each person work their own way. Many of the teams across the company were still building out processes and searching for the best way to fit various workflows together, so they were looking for the flexibility to adapt existing workflows or build completely new processes from the ground up.
But they also needed flexibility at the organizational level. The organization was in the midst of restructuring its business model to work based on product lines instead of individual projects. In this new model, projects are grouped under larger product lines, which have dedicated team members and staffing requirements. This gave the team more flexibility, changed the methodology for how they organized their data and helped them move faster. Hive was exactly what they needed to facilitate this change.
2. Approachability
The company was also drawn to Hive’s user-friendly interface and overall approachability – regardless of someone’s project management experience. In the past, they had received feedback from teams who said their tools were difficult to understand and required too much administrative configuration. Instead, people wanted a platform that was approachable, easy to comprehend, and would let them find what they were looking for just by clicking around. With Hive, the team could adapt as they went.
3. A smooth transition and self-start onboarding
To help with this transition, they worked with their Hive Customer Success representative to build out instructional modules for employees. With the help of these self-service lessons, everyone could dig into Hive and get started immediately while they waited for their wave of the formal onboarding process.
Because Hive was relatively easy for employees to learn – compared to many other tools on the market – and they didn’t need someone to spend weeks teaching them how to use it. Employees were able to dig in on a self-start path to get up and running without needing to be formally onboarded first.
Improving and Innovating With Hive
1. Simplifying existing processes and creating new opportunities
In many cases, their teams use Hive to simplify existing processes and build additional, enhanced collaboration.
For example, let’s look at the team’s process for requesting headcounts.
Before Hive, the team used a sequence of forms and spreadsheets that led to meetings. This process was long, prone to errors, and spread across several platforms. That’s not the case now. Instead of using several tools and piecing all parts together, the team has recreated this process in Hive, saving time and keeping all steps centralized in one single platform.
Here’s how it works: The headcount request process now begins with a form in Hive, which automatically routes information to a specific project. From there, the team can estimate against it and build plans to take into those same meetings. No need to ever leave the Hive platform.
In other cases, Hive has helped them identify new opportunities where there was no previous process in place. So instead of shrugging off an idea for how something could potentially work, employees now have a tool to help put it in action.
As Hive becomes more ingrained in its employees day to day work, the company envisions many more of these opportunities coming to life. Based on this roadmap, the team hopes to flesh out what a process model might look like in Hive, draft an example, and then transition it back to the process owner and the team that’s owning it to keep doing that work.
2. Managing resources across teams
Before Hive, it was difficult for these teams to manage resources across a variety of different tools. Hive solves this problem by translating all project work into the same “language” and tracking it in one single system. This lets their leadership understand which teams have the capacity to take on more work, so they can better allocate resources and plan for the future.
3. One-step reporting
Hive has significantly improved the reporting process at this company. Hive gives them the best of both worlds — teams have the flexibility to create their own workflows, but with all information now standardized and logged in one tool, it’s much easier to track and report progress.
Teams have the autonomy to build out their own preferred workspace, but the company can still keep track of projects, data, needed materials, and most of all, progress.
The team uses Hive’s Portfolio view for quick reporting at a higher level. For example, before Hive, each product manager used to type weekly updates in a shared Google doc, explaining what their team has done, what they are doing next, and what milestones are complete. Next, their directors would take that information and put it into an email to share out with stakeholders.
This is now built out in a Portfolio view in Hive, where everyone can see updates on product lines – and the projects within them -– on one single screen. Project managers manage the status of those projects, while the product managers are managing the status of the product lines. And just by looking at the Portfolio view, everyone can see which product lines are on track, which phase they’re in, and what’s coming up next. From there they can easily take a screenshot and send an update to stakeholders.
Hive Today: A Cornerstone Of Daily Work
Their department needed a single tool for everyone to work more efficiently, despite their unique responsibilities and use of a variety of different software platforms. Hive has done just that. Its flexibility and customizable projects allowed teams to transition smoothly into Hive, whether they were adapting existing workflows or building out a process from scratch.
Hive has become a tried-and-true part of the team’s daily work-life.. In fact, it’s hard for their teams to imagine the workplace without Hive now. Hive has improved the day-to-day work for hundreds of employees – and it’s only the beginning.
