How did the Process Master department come to life?

Continuing our Explore Evolution Engineering series of articles, which tells shares the background of people working in Evolution, we are now focusing on our Process Masters (PMs). We get a lot of questions about our Process Masters in Evolution. Are they Scrum Masters? Are they Project Managers or Product Managers? Let us give you some more insight on the role so you can find out for yourself.

The bigger the company grew, the more complex it became to manage the projects that were evolving with our fast-growing company. All the time, new departments and teams appeared and, as a result, communication and synchronization became more complicated. Scrum Masters alone were not enough to professionally manage the team and the complex projects. The responsibilities of Scrum Masters had been expanded beyond just the team.

Then the Process Masters (PM) community was formed in early 2020. The goal was to gather people who could choose the best processes for each development team and department as well as manage the project in its totality.

With the growth of the company and new hubs opening globally, the PM community expanded as well. Today we are represented in the Riga, Minsk, Lisbon, Warsaw, Tallinn, and Gothenburg Engineering hubs. The idea of creating such a role was born in the Product Portfolio and Data & Back Office departments, and its success led to the gradual spread of this role that went beyond Evolution Engineering. We have more than 20 people in such role all over the organization now.

We have bi-weekly meetings and monthly workshops to share knowledge with each other to overcome problems and improve the processes in close collaboration with colleagues. These self-organized meetings take place in the Lean Coffee format. Local meetings are also sometimes held where we collaborate on solving specific engineering hub challenges.

We also regularly create templates with best practices, so that knowledge is shared, and new colleagues can use it.

For beginners, we have an excellent knowledge base so they can be onboarded in no time with the help of Confluence (our internal learning resource) articles and attentive mentors.

What challenges the PMs have to face in their work?

1. Working with a team.

The first and most important thing the PM is taking care of is the team, its efficiency and transparency to avoid overload and disbalance. For these purposes, we:

• Setup team processes and agreements;
• Set up metrics, Jira boards, workflows, etc;
• Organize and facilitate all process meetings;
• Supervise the team ensuring it delivers and meets sprint goals;
• Assist the team in communication with other teams or solving dependencies;
• Resolve team conflicts;
• Help with organizing team building;
• Conduct Team health check.

2. Project planning and delivery.

At the same time, because we are an international publicly traded company, we must have an annual development plan. The annual plan consists of a list of games/services and major features with release dates.

Therefore, our next point of concentration is the development of a project plan and the definition of release dates. The company utilises organized Rolling Wave Planning. High-level planning takes place by compiling a Roadmap for the next 6–9 months. For medium-term or quarterly planning, the “Objectives and Key Results” (OKR) framework is used. Objectives and key results are formed based on the compiled Roadmap. Short-term planning is done every iteration.

All planning steps are carried out in close cooperation with the Product Owners (PO). Our goal is to work closely with the PO and the team to create a realistic plan, track progress and help meet the deadline. To be successful in this area, we need to know our product and all the processes in the company perfectly.

3. Inter-department interaction.

After establishing processes within the team and organizing games delivery on time, we always have the opportunity to take part in working on new approaches and tools, improve cross-department processes, and perform process audits on projects of other PMs. Conducting trainings in selected departments or the whole company is also encouraged.

What qualities do PMs need to possess?

Being a PM basically means you need a nice set of hard and soft skills to be able to perform the best.

What hard skills are needed:

1. Project management methodologies.
There are several of them and you need to learn them if you want to succeed in the PM profession. Each of the methodologies has its own principles, based on which you can effectively interact with people.

Agile is a family of practices that are based on the values of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development and the 12 principles that underlie it. They allow deviations from a predetermined plan, taking into account constantly changing conditions.

Scrum and Kanban — both systems are included in Agile, based on the principles of time management, but offer different approaches.
Scrum divides the workflow into equal sprints — usually periods from a week to a month, depending on the project and team. During this period, everyone does their part of the work, the results of which are discussed at the end of the sprint.

Kanban does not break a business process into universal sprints but rely on continuous task prioritization fostering a lean mindset. We sometimes use both systems as a basis for designing unique processes that fit teams’ needs.

2. Knowledge of your product development life cycle.
If you don’t know the details of how your product is created, how can you manage the people involved? It will be very difficult and will not be done without overlays because when planning, you need to imagine the real terms for completing a particular task, what is needed for this and how the processes are interconnected.

3. General orientation in the IT world.
Most often the team expects you to have a basic understanding of programming languages, frameworks, and knowledge of engineering vocabulary in order to stay on the same page as the developers.

4. Knowledge of different tools: Jira / Confluence / TeamRetro / Miro — are some of the most used in PM toolkit. This software and platforms are for collaborating on projects, setting, and tracking the status of tasks, allocating workload, etc. You need to know what they are, how to use them, and configure them in the best way for the team.

What soft skills are needed:

1. Proactivity — taking responsibility, not to waiting for the issue to be resolved by itself, and the ability to look at the situation from all angles in advance.
2. Adaptability/Flexibility. The PM must catch the change of the wind in order to react quickly to any changes and adjust on the fly, finding the best solutions as necessary.
3. Critical thinking. Be prepared to face misinformation. To do this, you must evaluate any data objectively — analyze the information received, and always do fact-checking. You need to develop critical thinking, learn to ask clarifying questions and analyze the information received in order to try to look at things in a fair way.
4. Ability to solve problems. A good manager is able to look for solutions and solve all the problems that appear without unnecessary emotion. This requires resilience, which will help you overcome all difficulties, and not give up when something goes wrong.
5. Communication is king! To inspire the team to work, along with discussing issues, receiving feedback, spreading transparency in your team and many more, you need love (and have the ability for) constructive communication. The ability to give and receive respectful feedback with patience and empathy is also the first step on the way to maintaining good relationships with your team and other departments, which is crucial.
6. Creativity and open-mindedness. Non-standard situations require extraordinary solutions. This is a kind of experiment, but thoughtful. This skill will also help organize the best collaboration for the team. Think outside the box. Having the ability to see how different processes can be linked to create something new and clearly understanding the motto: people over processes. Always strive to create processes that help the team rather than focusing on strict rules.
7. Persuasiveness. Clear and convincing communication is the superpower of any manager. But not only that: the ability to reasonably argue, negotiate and motivate is also important.
8. Leadership. Different situations require different leadership. In our way of working, it’s important to have experience in Visionary, Coaching, and Participatory leadership. The experience of knowing how to create ownership and involving everyone in the decision-making.

Can I join the Process Masters team?

Evolution is a fast-paced company that is ever-growing. If you are interested in joining one of our teams as a Process Master, feel free to follow our career page or reach out to our IT TA team on LinkedIn anytime.

The article was written by Aliaksandr Zadarozhny, with help of Aliona Mazeiko, Lum Shabani, Edgars Gaidels, and Natallia Sharkova.