How Ubisoft fosters focused creativity with Easy Agile
Ubisoft is the video game company behind some of the most well-known games in the industry, including Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry, and Just Dance. The global organization is headquartered in France and has 59 development studios as well as 21,000 employees across the world.
One of the biggest challenges for the organization was how to do the right amount of planning, particularly within a remote working environment, with thousands of people based all over the world. It’s this challenge that prompted the team to find the right tool to help better manage their planning process.
Complex projects years in the making
At Ubisoft, the process to develop and produce a new video game often takes several years. The game will go through several evolutions during this time, and involve multiple project teams. The size of these teams can range from a few dozen people to almost 1,000, making a structured planning process critical.
“When you've got people on five continents working 24/7 trying to bring something together that's never existed before, it's inherently complex,” said David Brickley, Producer at Ubisoft.
“We tried several different tools to overcome this, but the tools were either designed for a low level of detail or they didn’t lend themselves to bringing everything together. There was no structure, so everyone was doing things differently and it was hard to get a cohesive picture.”
The team wanted something that was structured in the right way, very easy to add to, and very quick to re-calibrate.
Getting global teams on the same page
Ubisoft had been using Jira as their standard planning tool for several years, so David turned to the marketplace in his search for a better solution.
“We settled on Easy Agile Story Maps (now Easy Agile TeamRhythm) because it was clear what it could do and how it could help us with the processes we wanted to adopt,” said David. “The out-of-the-box version covered the basics, but it was also very easy to see how people have customized it for further use.”
“There’s a playboard available on the site, so anybody can go in and basically play around with the data to see what it looks like. And that’s fantastic because it was quite an easy pitch and to go to people and say, have a play with this.”
David, Producer, Ubisoft
Adopting Easy Agile
The team secured management buy-in fast, following just two weeks of trialling the software. They then began a more in-depth trial of the software (still using their free access), spending around two months using it in a focused way. Any questions during the period were answered within 24 hours, helping cement the decision that this was the right tool for the team.
Since implementing Easy Agile User Story Maps (now TeamRhythm), David has seen several benefits for the business.
Team buy-in and engagement
With the team already comfortable with Jira and Agile principles, using the plugin meant people could easily click, drag, add, and rework until they had the picture they wanted. “The familiarity was super important,” said David of the Jira integration. “The team had the foundations and already knew where it was going, but this added an extra dimension”.
Clear goals and less noise
“The plugin allows us to be much clearer about what we need – and only what we need. By the end of a milestone, we’ve got less noise to deal with, which has also had a considerable impact on team morale,” said David.
Deeper detail and clarity
David found the level of detail helped keep teams on track and productive. “I think its real power is when it comes to our sprints and our milestones, because we can go more granular with the deliverables. We can see both the long-term and the short-term view and make decisions quickly about how to keep the plates spinning in the most productive way”.
Enabling people to be their creative best
Hundreds of Ubisoft employees are now using Easy Agile TeamRhythm as part of their day-to-day work. David is now considering how to share the benefits internally across other teams as he believes it should be part of their ‘bread and butter’.
“We’re trying to build a picture of something that doesn’t exist. What we ultimately should be doing as facilitators of these creative endeavours is to give people the right tools to do the work. So, we’re all about empowering incredibly great creative people that we hire, to put their skills to good use, and not hold them down in digital paperwork.”
David, Producer, Ubisoft
Related Case Studies
Lyft boosts velocity by 20% with digital user story maps
Lyft is on a mission to deliver the world’s best transportation for people through shared rides, bikeshare systems, electric scooters, and public transit partnerships. Based in San Francisco, Lyft services are available in over 600 cities across the United States and Canada.
The business had grown significantly in recent years, using agile practices to help deliver great transportation experiences. But Lyft reached a turning point with the sudden shift to working from home after the pandemic hit. Without in-person collaboration and access to physical storyboards, the business needed to find a way to take agile into employee’s homes.Driving one shared story across the customer journey
For every customer journey at Lyft, there are dozens of teams managing different touchpoints behind the scenes. These teams manage multiple customers and deliver a different experience for each. Lyft relies on Atlassian’s Jira to manage this work, prioritise actions, and ensure teams are achieving optimal flow.
The challenge for Lyft lay in finding a way to keep teams focused on the same end goal while working on different touchpoints and across different locations.
“Many teams may know their mission well, but they might not necessarily know the entire end-to-end goal. When a business grows and scales, its focus on the broader goal can get lost. Having one shared story that aligns teams with what you’re trying to deliver is very powerful”.
John Walpole - Principal Technical Project Manager, Lyft
“Many teams may know their mission well, but they might not necessarily know the entire end-to-end goal,” said John Walpole, Principal Technical Project Manager at Lyft. “When a business grows and scales, its focus on the broader goal can get lost. Having one shared story that aligns teams with what you’re trying to deliver is very powerful”.
📖 READ: The User Journey Map Begins With Epic Storytelling
Lyft uses user story maps to help share this one story and align work priorities for teams across the business. After the pandemic hit, they had to find a way to replace their physical user story maps in multiple offices and pull virtual teams together - fast.
Moving agile from the office to the home
The business wanted to find a way to make in-office collaboration virtual and help people feel like they were in the same room, working together to deliver for the customer in the real world.
“Making sure we get maximum team flow and great velocity is key,” said John. “So, we didn’t want something that required hours and hours of onboarding, especially when you’re looking at training thousands of people.”
When looking for the best solution, John kept these key questions in mind:
- Is the solution easy to use?
- Does it have an intuitive user interface?
- Do our people enjoy using it?
- Does it meet our security standards?
- Will it help increase our velocity?
- Can it deliver ROI?
Finding the right fit
The business looked into several different products, but found they created more work for the teams. “We had to replace our backlog and scrum set-ups, making it much less efficient. The overheads of managing that saw our velocity go down,” said John.
With Easy Agile User Story Maps (now Easy Agile TeamRhythm), the business found a much simpler process, with an out of the box product that could be used with their existing tools.
“Because we use Atlassian Jira and Easy Agile is built on that, it was natural to our ecosystem and easy to roll it out,” said John. “It was super easy to onboard ourselves because it was incredibly intuitive. You just add the plug-in and it works.”
As part of the roll out, John trained the coaches, who then trained their teams, and so on, until everyone was trained. This process created advocates for agile practices along the way, helping make adoption easier.
Easy Agile TeamRhythm
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Boosting business velocity by 20%
For Lyft, the key measure of success came down to whether they could deliver more value to both riders and drivers in cities using these tools.
“Since rolling out Easy Agile User Story Maps (now TeamRhythm), we’ve seen a 20% increase across all our velocity metrics,” says John. “This has happened internally across developer metrics and externally with things like call centre volume, help and support tickets, as well as people being stuck and feeling frustrated”.
John has also received positive feedback from the teams across Lyft on:
- Data representation that’s easy to digest
- The natural and intuitive drag-and-drop functionality
- Keeping a single source of truth with no duplication required
“Easy Agile brings the user story front and centre to our developers, to our product managers, to our data scientists, and across the board – everyone now has that shared story, or what we call the backbone,” says John.
The future of agile at Lyft
John sees a bright future for Lyft, and it’s focused around scaling agility.
“When you grow to a team of thousands working from home offices across different geographical areas, it can be a real struggle to scale – but Easy Agile helps you do that,” says John.
After using Easy Agile User Story Maps (now Easy Agile TeamRhythm), the business is keen to explore the wider product set with Easy Agile Personas and Easy Agile Roadmaps.
“Personas is something I’m super excited about because we think about Personas all the time, only we haven’t digitised it yet within Jira,” said John. “I’m also really excited about Roadmaps and creating a frictionless planning process.”
"With Easy Agile the team can get back to doing the work they enjoy delivering, rather than admin, reporting, or learning a complex new tool.”
John Walpole - Principal Technical Project Manager, Lyft
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Chaos to clarity: How NFON mastered dependencies
NFON is a leading cloud-based Unified Communications (UC) provider, helping over 50,000 customers and working with over 3,000 partners across Europe. As part of their goal to create a more agile company, the business is undergoing a company-wide transformation led by Agile Transition Leader, Solution Engineer and System Architect Stefan Höhn.
A major challenge during this project was managing dependencies across a large development team. “We still have over 100 people working on designing and developing our services. This means we have around 14 to 15 teams with many dependencies, so we needed to find a way to manage this process better,” said Stefan.
Planning session filled with fun - and chaos
“Do you have any idea what we have done here?”
“Well, yes, I linked the user stories”
“But can you comprehend it? Can you visualize it?”
“No, I can’t”
Conversation between Stefan and his colleague
The difficulty in visualizing dependencies was a major sticking point for Stefan and the business. PI Planning sessions - described as ‘fun but chaotic’ - were where the teams struggled the most. “We would have around 250 people meet in a space with five-meter wide and three-meter high walls where people would add their ideas and find threads and dependencies,” he said. “But after we dispersed and went back to the office, the momentum was gone. And I would always ask - can we have somehow done that in an electronic way?”.
The problem to be solved
When Stefan began looking for a solution, he found very few options that helped visually manage dependencies. After discovering Easy Agile Programs, Stefan felt he had found the tool he was looking for.
"What we try to achieve is to really manage our dependencies," said Stefan. "If you have so many people, things get complex."
"So if you imagine you have 14 teams in a sprint. You could assume you'd have at least 140 user stories, and a likelihood that there are dependencies, many dependencies, within the team and outside of the team."
"Easy Agile Programs helps make the whole plan much more visible, and helps us prevent surprises that teams wouldn't deliver something that would've been necessary or important for other teams. I think we've seen quite an improvement there."
The solution
Creating and visualizing dependencies
“Easy Agile Programs makes it so easy to manage the dependencies. It's not only about the visualization of the dependencies, but also creating them. These are actually two things I love most about the tool."
Stefan Höhn, Agile Transition Leader, NFON
“We’re trying to use the techniques in SAFe, and that includes PI planning,” said Stefan. “During PI Planning, the teams would talk about objectives and risks. But now there's a third thing we want the teams to talk about, and that's the dependencies."
"When the business owners come around and talk to the teams and see what they've done throughout planning, one of the topics is 'can you show us your dependencies?' And that wouldn’t be possible without the tool”.
"It's not only about the visualization of the dependencies, but also creating them. These are two things I actually love most about the tool," said Stefan.
In Easy Agile Programs, teams have a dedicated planning space where they can create dependencies within and between teams, and these will be automatically added to the Jira issue.
"More and more teams are seeing the value in planning and having that support of it being visible, because it's easy to see if they're running into a problem.""(Sometimes) you may not even be aware that you have a problem. So what I would tell you is, if you create dependencies - links within Jira - just use Easy Agile Programs and visualize it, to see whether you have a problem or not."
The colour of the dependency line in Easy Agile Programs indicate its health, and with the the help of filters, it's easy to isolate discussions to where teams need to be unblocked. If a dependency is green it's healthy, yellow it is at risk and a red dependency line indicates a conflict.
"I encourage teams to look at the dependencies regularly, every other week to see if something has changed. And most likely it has changed."
"We even created some 'rules' or guidance to make a habit out of discussing dependencies. We basically say, green is fine, you must not have any red ones, and make sure you have as few yellow (dependency lines) as possible between the teams and none within the team."
As a native app inside Jira, Easy Agile Programs enables you to create dependencies between two native Jira issues using Jira dependency links within the tool, and these are automatically reflected elsewhere in Jira in real time.
Managing dependencies
“With Easy Agile Programs, it took us three minutes to fix our dependencies. And even that amazed us”.
Stefan Höhn, Agile Transition Leader, NFON
When Stefan shared how Easy Agile Programs could visualize dependencies with his colleague, he then asked, "How do we go about fixing this? What do you think, how long would it take to actually untangle it?"
His colleague suggested a week.
"With Easy Agile Programs, it took us three minutes to fix our dependencies. And even that amazed us."
Being able to see tasks in the correct sequence and not only understand if there would be any dependencies, but also address them, has saved time and improved the ability to plan reliably.
"You can move work around visually, and while you're moving it around you can see whether. you create new problems or make it better."
"Really the tool helps us to do things faster and much more - I wouldn't even say efficiently - but effectively."
Easy Agile Programs brings clarity to the chaosStefan has now embedded Easy Agile Programs into NFON’s agile practices to help facilitate their PI Planning process and better manage dependencies. “This experience shows how tools can make a difference,” said Stefan. “It’s why I’m always telling teams to just use the tool - create dependencies, link it to Jira, and try it out”.
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How AF group closed hybrid PI planning gaps
AF Group is on a mission to provide innovative insurance solutions and deliver exceptional customer experiences via its network of affiliate brands. As part of this mission, the group embarked on an enterprise-wide SAFe transformation to better align products to strategy and continuously deliver value. It was during this project where issues around collaboration and virtual PI planning came to a head.
“We’ve always worked in our silos, so identifying and then creating dependencies has been a big obstacle for us,” said Amanda Latusek, Manager, Enterprise Portfolio & PMO at AF Group. “We needed to find a way to work together as a cohesive team to deliver our PI objectives”.
The problem to be solved: collaboration during virtual PI Planning
Collaboration across virtual teams was essential to delivering the transformation, but making this happen in practice during virtual PI planning events was a struggle. The team tried two different solutions prior to Easy Agile Programs to help address this, only to have Scrum Masters needing to duplicate their work to try and bridge the gaps. They also found dependencies weren’t always planned for or communicated, which resulted in unplanned work coming into the PI execution phase and missed commitments.
“We didn’t have a program board that would provide us the visualization we needed to collaborate effectively,” said Amanda. “So, when I came across Easy Agile Programs, I decided to bring in the tool to see if it could help facilitate our virtual PI planning”.
From demo to implementation in two weeks
“The biggest thing that stood out to me about Easy Agile Programs was the ease of use.”
Amanda, Manager - Enterprise Portfolio & PMO, AF Group
Amanda spent two hours testing the tool within the sandbox environment. After getting a better understanding of the tool’s capabilities and functionalities, she created bespoke training videos to share with team members in different timezones so they could learn async how the application worked in their organizational context.
“I was able to stand it up and train our product managers, scrum masters, and RTEs on the tool in two weeks before we used it in our real-life virtual planning PI event,” said Amanda. “We had minimal challenges when transitioning to Easy Agile Programs, with Jira already configured in a way that fit nicely into the tool”.
Clear results within the first PI planning session
“We noticed results within the first PI Planning session as we could see how our teams were collaborating together and identifying dependencies.”
Amanda, Manager - Enterprise Portfolio & PMO, AF Group
Amanda admits that though she was initially nervous about introducing another change management piece to the transformation project, the results have been worth it. “The positive feedback about using this tool has been incredible,” said Amanda. The wins for AF Group include:
Improved collaboration during and beyond PI Planning
“The improvement in collaboration has been a night and day difference,” said Amanda. “The tool is forcing us to have conversations about dependencies during the PI event and encourages more collaboration during the PI execution. As a result, our teams are aware of the risks related to dependencies and they can mitigate those as soon as possible”.
Identifying and managing dependencies to deliver value
Amanda explains that the tool has helped the team overcome challenges around identifying dependencies. “Easy Agile Programs helped us quickly overcome this hurdle so we could start collaborating more efficiently as a team,” said Amanda. “We're seeing more and more dependencies being identified and tracked, which ultimately leads to better quality and delivery of value.”
No duplication of work for better efficiency
Fully integrated capabilities within Jira have played a key part in helping AF Groups’ Agile teams be more effective during PI Planning and more efficient during the execution phase. “With Easy Agile Programs, we don’t need to duplicate our work in Jira,” said Amanda. “Instead, we can create our program within the tool, and it seamlessly integrates into our Jira application, automatically linking any issues or dependencies we’ve identified”.
Better managing risks
“The visualization Easy Agile Programs provides has helped us manage risks,” said Amanda. “The tool will call out healthy, at risk, and blocked (dependencies)risks. This drives better communication across the Agile release trains so they can tackle the right type of risks accordingly”.
Value beyond PI Planning
One of the unexpected benefits of introducing the tool was the application of the program board beyond PI Planning. “Our team members are now using it for our Scrum of Scrums so they can take that collaboration across other Agile teams to ensure timely delivery,” said Amanda.
Driving better collaboration to deliver more value
AF Group now has around 300 people relying on Easy Agile Programs for PI Planning events across four Agile release trains and seven shared services teams. “Easy Agile Programs allowed our business to come together and collaborate in a more efficient way,” said Amanda. ”It’s helped create more trust and ultimately, helped us deliver more value across our organization.”
“My advice to other companies considering Easy Agile Programs is not to wait. The tool has brought us a lot of success for our Agile practices enterprise-wide in a short period of time”.
Amanda, Manager - Enterprise Portfolio & PMO, AF Group