Description
We are looking for an exceptional candidate to join our team to drive and manage best practice project management processes to support day-to-day game development operations, be an advocate and champion for quality and the predicable delivery of features and technical initiatives for our Avakin live game.
The successful candidate will have a proven track record in senior development and or project management on large scale and complex projects as a Project Management leader and capable of supporting multiple concurrent projects with cross discipline scrum/agile teams. Reporting to the Development Director, you will be responsible for supporting the quality delivery of project and their planning both, and external as required, to deliver and meet product and business goals.
You will collaborate with Production leadership, Producer, Product Owners, and senior stakeholders including developers to create release plans, manage capacity and resource requirements, run estimation and dependency planning, build and track teams’ velocity, ensure agile/sprint ceremonies are in place and that clear outcomes are communicated and reported across teams.
This is a highly visible position inside the company. You will keep Leadership informed and teams focussed and on track to meet sprint and release goals, identify issues and work with the teams and Producers to resolve and mitigate risk and development challenges.
This role can be based out of any of our Lockwood offices (Cambridge, Lisbon, Nottingham, Newcastle, Vilnius) or fully remote with the option of office work at your discretion.
Responsibilities
- Assessing the Scrum Maturity of the team and organization and coaching the team to higher levels of maturity, at a pace that is sustainable and comfortable for the team and organization.
- Facilitate/participate in key Agile practices across our game feature development teams.
- Ensure backlog grooming tasks and refine are maintained over sprint cycles.
- Ensure daily stand-ups, sprint plannings, post-mortems, retrospectives, etc. are in place.
- Capacity planning and balancing resources and workload to optimize velocity and quality.
- Build a trusting and safe environment where problems can be raised without fear of blame, retribution, or being judged, with an emphasis on collaboration and problem solving.
- Create studio transparency across the whole development cycle for feature/initiatives during planning and in production through successful release into the live game
- Collaborate with a cross-discipline Scrum teams to create clear plans and scope the project.
- Maintain clear documentation on sprint and release goals.
- Track, report and communicate project status.
- Monitor and report on key delivery performance metrics to leadership team.
- Identify and mitigate dependencies/risks early and communicate/escalate them clearly and appropriately.
- Champion Jira and Confluence, evolving the process to best suit the situation and educating junior colleagues on best practices.
- Contribute and drive process improvement on a continuous basis.
- Assess current project management tools and identify opportunities to that enable improved project planning, tracking and management of project tasks
- Ensure all team members have the resources they need to meet product goals.
Requirements
- Multiple years of experience in software development project management with a preference of experience producing and releasing games. Mobile and PC preferred.
- Excellent communicator.
- Great skills to coach and mentor teams how to follow agile scrum framework
- Experience in managing resources, capacity tracking and velocity metrics.
- Knowledge of Agile methodology and frameworks like Scrum, Kanban, XP, Waterfall etc.
- Expert understanding of Agile practices: User Stories, Continuous Integration, ATDD, TDD, Continuous Testing, Automated Testing, etc.
- Able to articulate issues, requirements, and vision.
- Ability to inspire teammates, motivate others and achieve team targets.
- Expert understanding of using Jira and Confluence for project planning and reporting.
- Experience using other project management tools for development such as Hansoft or related tools a plus
- Working knowledge of Airtable a bonus
- Advanced knowledge of Microsoft Office tools like MS Word, MS Excel, and MS PowerPoint.
- Candidate should be a self-motivated, independent, detail oriented, responsible team player and exhibit exceptional relationship management skills.
