One chief developer told us that the company recently went through another wave of restructuring: iLogos is growing, so it was very important to fortify it with management. At the time, there was a four-person board of directors – a CEO, a CBDO, and 2 founders. There is the top management: the heads of areas – art, development, production. Further down are the leads and project teams.
Resource management teams are responsible for the transition between video game development, including the heads of departments, who understand what is going on, when what project is ending and a new one is starting, what expertise is needed, what people to bring together, and what people to recruit. They try to change people only after the end of the project, otherwise, it becomes stressful.
In fact, one of the curators pointed out that some specialists, on the contrary, treat this well. For example, conceptual artists like to work with diverse material; for them, the specificity of moving from project to project with different styling is even a positive thing. They ask for it. Game Art Studio is developing pretty fast.
When asked why the company did not make its own product, the head of the company replied that the iLogos business is already quite old. It’s a self-sustaining company, it has no investors. Sales and customer interaction pipelines are all set up for that. It’s already a run-down ship that’s hard to turn around. But within it, there is an RND direction, where the team is testing different versions of hypotheses in order to start doing more things at the same time. No one is going to change the main course, but when the RND gives a certain result, it will become something separate.
How collaboration starts and goes
A lot depends on the client: how deeply into decision-making, into the validation of what is being done. But in general, it looks like this – the client comes with a request to biz devs, then there is a consolidated call with techleaders, heads of departments on what is needed to fulfill the order. Depending on this formed the front of work and a team, taking into account the wishes of the client on communication and control.
All this has an impact on the composition of the team. If we are talking about development, you need a team leader, developers, if you need an external PM. All clients have access to Jira by default – you can see which people do what and how they work. There are even cases where every team member the client wanted to interview and approve himself.
Sometimes they come to iLogos for point-by-point expertise. Sometimes they need to write a backend, and sometimes the client wants to scale the production of the art content for personal computers, but their pipelines are not geared for this.
According to our head of the system, not everyone understands how to work properly with outsourcing. It is not enough to just come in, give them money, come back in six months and get a good result. It’s a two-way game, it’s necessary to build tight communication. There has to be an effort on the part of the client, too.
Galenkin added that working with an outsourcer involves a fairly heavy workload for the company that orders the outsourcer. Not only the project has to be managed, but also the integration.
The head of the company says that there are different situations. For example, there is the outsourcing model, when certain people become part of the client’s team, the client is under a lot of management burden on a day-to-day basis. There are situations where an outsourced team takes a large chunk of the business, and the client verifies what is going on. In this case, the workload is less. If it is the manufacture of art content, then there needs to be close communication between the art leads.