HIGH time for something BIG! How High5Games upped their game with BigPicture

The highly competitive and fast-paced gaming industry faces the challenge of an everyday rush to get new content to market quickly. Having a quick and effective inception-to-launch process is the key to success for companies like High5Games, one of the leaders of the gaming industry. We have asked High5Games to share their story of implementing and using BigPicture to showcase how quality software products can help speed up internal processes and ensure effective and timely implementations within an organization.

High5Games team.

Company: High 5 Games

Industries: Land-based casinos, Online games

Location: New York, New Jersey, Kansas, U.K.

Product: BigPicture

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High5Games—Meet the Leader & Pioneer

Founded in 1995 High5Games is recognized and celebrated for being a pioneer in the gaming industry. Over the years the company has had spectacular success creating popular slot machine games for land-based casinos. They have come to be the owners of several gaming houses: High 5 Casino, High 5 Vegas, Shake the Sky, and more. They have also been exploring other gaming areas: social online games (starting in 2012), and—since very recently— real money games. The company has seen rapid development in all three areas. Growth always comes with new challenges, but High5Games is ready and well-prepared for constructive change management.

Why BigPicture?

Kelli Trogani is High5Games’ Director of Project Management in charge of all PMs dispersed across different business areas within the company, responsible for roadmapping and project planning for each of those areas.  For improved efficiency and effectiveness, Kelli and her team found they lacked:

• an overall timeline view of ongoing, past, and planned projects,
• a solution to allow an easy display and tracking of dependencies,
• a place to clearly show where resources were becoming strained.

“We were also trying to find the best way to integrate across the different program areas to give that ‘one view’ of the overall company portfolio,” says Kelli.

Relying heavily on the Atlassian tools, it was only natural for High5Games to look for a solution that would be easily integrable with already used software. After researching several Project Management apps that work well with Jira, and having experimented with Structure and Portfolio / Advanced Roadmaps, they decided to give BigPicture a try.  “We unanimously liked the Gantt view in BigPicture better. Plus we saw a clear benefit in the way the app smoothly integrated with Jira. That was the key!”

The Benefits

Big Picture has proven to be useful for High5Games. After testing its benefits on B2C real money endeavor—their guinea pig program, the company was able to ascertain the app’s usefulness in providing realistic timelines based on tasks and highlighted areas where dependencies exist. As a result, High5Games is currently expanding BP usage in their B2B business as well as their B2C social business.

What the team particularly likes in BigPicture is its Gantt feature, which they have utilized heavily and found to be user-friendly and effective: “Being able to show a Gantt chart that clearly displays the amount of work that needs to be done, the length of time it takes to complete that work, and the necessary resources, has been immensely helpful in trying to level set expectations with key stakeholders. Being able to distinctly show dependencies has helped guide conversations around risk management and helped with prioritizing tasks.”

What’s next?

High5Games have plans to expand BigPicture usage into different processes and teams in the company—they are looking to take their three main initiatives, each already using their own BigPicture program and respective Gantt charts, and integrate them to show how it fits in with the company portfolio view. The teams also hope that they will begin to utilize the resource management across different programs, as well as BigPicture Risk Matrix to track and mitigate possible obstacles and issues.

“Useful as we have found it so far, we are yet to learn how to utilize BigPicture to its full potential. And we are very much looking forward to it!” Kelli sums up.