How Old Skull Games Unlocked Their Full Potential with Oboard

Old Skull Games (Old Skull Games) is a small, but extremely talented gaming studio from Villeurbanne, Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, France. They are mostly known for their licensed IP projects and their work on the Valiant Hearts series with Ubisoft. However, the studio has much bigger ambitions and wants to create their own IPs — which requires a much more efficient management system.

Old Skull Games recognized the need for a strategic pivot to enhance focus, alignment, and execution across its diverse and talented teams. The Objectives and Key Results (OKR) framework was chosen to solve priority shifts, siloed departments, and the constant juggling of reactive tasks versus proactive planning. This case study delves into Old Skull Games’s OKR journey, exploring the motivations, implementation process, challenges, benefits, and future steps in their continuous quest for operational excellence.

Background

Old Skull Games’s leadership identified a critical need for a framework that could encapsulate the company’s agile, transparent, autonomous, and accountable culture. Before OKRs, the senior management team and department heads grappled with disjointed initiatives and excessive meetings to synchronize efforts. 

The biggest challenges were the constant switching between priorities, lack of long-term planning, and lack of a global vision for the company. The latter problem was emphasized by having multiple teams with extremely diverse skill sets and objectives. This created a workplace where everyone performed well but didn’t work together.

Why Old Skull Games Chose OKRs

Originally, the OKRs were suggested as a solution to the management issued by a former marketing director who had experience at Blizzard. The OKR initiative aimed to streamline focus and foster mid-to-long-term goal alignment, addressing the studio’s challenges of fluctuating priorities and the need for a cohesive direction across its multifaceted teams.

William Marle (the current COO) took the helm in 2023 and played a crucial role in adopting and expanding OKRs within Old Skull Games. His approach was methodical and inclusive, relying on extensive training, one-on-one discussions, and voluntary participation to cultivate organizational buy-in.

How Old Skull Games Adopted OKRs

The adoption began with the senior management team and gradually permeated through department heads, producers, and project leads. Adoption was completely voluntary and wasn’t imposed on anyone. Those who chose to use OKRs in their work were granted support in form of trainings, webinars, podcasts, one-on-one consultations, and books. As an anecdote, Old Skull Games purchased 15 copies of Measure What Matters just to help convince key personnel to try OKRs.

To ensure a seamless integration of OKRs into the company’s management structure, Old Skull Games established clear ground rules:

• No more than 4 Objectives per team;
• No more than 5 Key Results per Objective;
• Objectives should directly relate to the team’s role, responsibilities, and strategic contribution;
• All team members should understand the level of commitment to each OKR;
• Team members check in with each other and share progress every two weeks.

To overcome previous challenges of hierarchical and siloed approaches, Old Skull Games divided their personnel into 20 dynamic teams (or Chapters). To be able to maintain control over those chapters, the company chose the Flash Alignment model.. This model fostered a more collaborative and efficient environment, enabling quicker decision-making and enhancing cross-departmental cooperation.

How Oboard Helped Old Skull Games

Originally, Old Skull Games used Excel to run their OKR cycles. It was quick and simple but lacked necessary features like OKR grading. In addition, as more and more team members were granted access to the file, the risk of mistakes grew exponentially. 

After a thorough market analysis, Old Skull Games selected Oboard as their OKR management tool, drawn by its ease of adoption, integration with JIRA, and user-friendly interface. Despite initial challenges with grading and the crafting phase, Oboard facilitated a significant leap towards full transparency, accountability, and cross-functional alignment within Old Skull Games.

The key points that led Old Skull Games to Oboard were:

• Easy adoption. Oboard tools are integrated into JIRA, which was already used by 75% of the workforce.
• Simple UI. It only took 30 minutes to explain all the necessary features in the OKR Board for JIRA and showcase how to use them in action.
• Custom Dashboards. Simple and aesthetic designs with custom selection of OKRs are very useful for short OKRs business reviews.
• Support. Old Skull Games’ senior management use the Oboard OKR Accelerator program and even presented their own experience at one of the webinars.

“We wanted something that is easy to use for everyone, with a small learning curve… [Oboard] does the minimum you need at this in our journey. We wanted levels, intervals, different teams, start and end dates — and this was all easy.”

They also called out a few non-crucial points where Oboard had potential for improvement. All of those were taken into consideration and will be implemented in the future.

• Custom grading rules (overgrading, negative grading) are difficult to set up;
• Setting multiple OKRs at once can be work-intensive;
• There is no Slack integration.

How OKRs Improved Old Skull Games’ Performance

At the moment of this case study (March 2024), William is overseeing the 5th quarterly OKR cycle at Old Skull Games. For the last 2 quarters, the OKRs have been slowly expanding beyond the senior management to the rank-and-file employees, and by now >50% of studio members have at least 1 OKR attached to their name.

Recently, the company took a survey to see how successful the OKR adoption was among all its users. 85% of respondents were positive about it, citing that many of them could finally complete the long-standing initiatives and ambitions through the use of OKRs. In particular, the ability to focus only on one well-defined Objective and achieve tangible results was cited as the biggest reason for success. However, some respodents did call out unnecessary changes to their workflow imposed by the system.

The OKR framework has propelled Old Skull Games towards a culture of strategic long-term vision, alignment, and anticipation. It has democratized the goal-setting process, allowing for a tangible sense of progress and achievement across the studio. However, aligning 20 teams and crafting meaningful OKRs remain significant challenges, demanding continuous effort and refinement.

Old Skull Games’s next steps include the formation of an OKR Guild to streamline alignment and foster a community of OKR ambassadors. The focus will be on optimizing the OKR cycles, enhancing training, and embracing a philosophy of continuous improvement without extending OKRs to individual performance metrics.

Want to learn more about the OldSkullGames approach to OKRs? Check out William’s presentation for the Oboard’s OKR Accelerator program!

Conclusion

Right now, Old Skull Games continues to refine its approach to OKRs, embracing the lessons learned and building on the successes achieved.

Old Skull Games’ OKR journey showcases transformation, strategic clarity, and enhanced team synergy within the fast-paced realm of video game development. The transition to OKRs, supported by the Oboard platform, has not only addressed the studio’s initial challenges of focus and alignment but has also fostered a culture of accountability, transparency, and continuous improvement.

For companies looking to enhance their strategic planning and execution capabilities, the Old Skull Games’ case study underscores the transformative potential of OKRs when coupled with a powerful management tool like Oboard. We encourage organizations of all sizes and industries to consider how the principles of OKRs, combined with the right technological support, can drive their own success stories.

Interested in exploring how OKRs and Oboard can revolutionize your strategic alignment and execution? We invite you to dive deeper into the functionalities and benefits of Oboard. Discover how this platform can streamline your OKR process, foster team alignment, and drive measurable outcomes. Sign up for a demo with us right now, and let Oboard be the catalyst for your organization’s next level of growth and success!