Most of the support questions are today handled by Hansoft’s support managers, trained in the tool, industry specifics as well as project management, and they are all certified ScrumMasters. The Hansoft productivity consulting services are a compliment to cover the need for sharing more advanced best practices.

Hansoft Certified Trainer Program

One step in satisfying the demand for Hansoft training and productivity consulting is the launch of the Hansoft Certified Trainer program. The program is open to independent consultants with a deep experience and understanding of the production of games. They are carefully selected for their pragmatic approach to productivity improvement and focus on team empowerment best practices.

“Hansoft is a very intuitive tool and most of our clients just go ahead and start using it. Sometimes we do onsite productivity consulting, to share production best practices and help studios scaling agile and lean methodologies to the size and specifics of games development. To meet the growing interest for these more advanced consulting services, we are now increasing our capacity, and since we want to stay a tools vendor and not become a consulting company, we started the Hansoft Certified Trainer program. This program enables consultants in the industry to help our clients to be more productive in their use of Hansoft. I’m very proud to announce the first three certified trainers: Gordon Moyes, Heather Maxwell Chandler and Jim Whitelaw,” said Hansoft CEO Patric Palm.

Gordon Moyes has a wide range of experience in the game industry. From programming graphics and AI for the ground breaking real time strategy game Dark Reign: The Future of War (1997), he was more recently the Senior Producer for the original Destroy All Humans! and its sequel for Pandemic Studios Australia. In between, Gordon spent several years at Activision Santa Monica on titles such as Star Trek: Armada. Specializing in Hansoft training and plug in customization, he primarily offers his services in Australia and Asia. Gordon holds a Bachelor of IT and an MBA.

Heather Maxwell Chandler has been working in the game industry since 1996 and has production experience at Ubisoft, Electronic Arts, Activision, on over 35 titles across multiple platforms. Her experience as an internal and external producer gives her a deep knowledge of best production practices. She is the author of The Game Production Handbook, and numerous other articles on game development. She is a Certified ScrumMaster and is committed to training teams how to get the most of their people, tools, and methods. Specializing in Hansoft training, improving production pipelines, and team building, she offers services in the U.S. and Europe.

Jim Whitelaw has been leading software development initiatives for more than fifteen years and has been using agile techniques for more than ten. He has been in senior positions at companies like Intuit and BioWare with experience in web development, desktop shrinkwrap software and video game development. Jim founded denovoPRO Consulting to focus on helping software development teams to transition to agile development and to grow their agile expertise. Jim has a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Waterloo, is a PMP as well as a certified ScrumMaster. Jim is an active member in the agile community, a proponent of scrum and an enthusiastic leader, teacher and coach. Based in Canada, Jim provides service to clients in North America and Europe.

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Several universities and game development schools have signed up for educational licenses and Hansoft is now being used in a number of student projects around the world. One of them is the Scottish Centre for Excellence in Computer Games Education, at University of Abertay Dundee.

“We expect our students to work on computer games development projects in a professional studio environment, and in a professional manner. Hansoft enables the students to work together across courses and disciplines with improved communications, project management and reporting practices. With Hansoft’s educational license, we get the opportunity to use a professional tool at undergraduate level, something that makes our students better equipped to create high quality media and develop professional practices that will get them that dream job after graduation”, said Gregor White, Director of Academic Enterprise, University of Abertay Dundee.

The idea behind the educational license is to fill the need for universities to be in tune with the latest tools in the industry, for studios to be able to recruit graduates already proficient in using Hansoft and for students to increase their chances on the highly competitive job market.

“This initiative actually came directly from the industry. Several of our clients independently approached us about the idea of an educational license to make student more ready for the everyday work at their studios. The response from lecturers and students has been overwhelming and we are really glad to be able to support the talent of the future with Hansoft”, said Hansoft CEO Patric Palm.

Another example is Image Campus in Argentina.

“At Image Campus, we have identified that one of the major problems within many Digital Media Development Studios, and particularly Games Development Studios, is the lack of use of good project management methodologies and tools. In the process we tried many project management tools, from off-the-shelf products to open source solutions, until we found and chose to use Hansoft. One of the greatest advantages of Hansoft is the ability to integrate agile development methodologies with collaborative scheduling in one view. This speeds up production cycles and puts data in the hands of Project Managers with real time reporting. Also, by having an integrated tool deployed across the studio, artists, developers and project managers all know exactly where they are in the production cycle and what is left to tackle in each hierarchical level. We consider project management skills key factors of success and we truly believe that teaching them is an obligation for serious schools who care about the quality of their graduates and about their future in a competitive industry. Hansofts educational license allows us to do so and we expect that Hansoft will keep addressing studios needs and to provide top quality software in the future”, says Aníbal Menezes, Institutional Relations Manager, Image Campus.

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"Hansoft's integration offers an intelligent agile solution that supports the workflow Perforce users are accustomed to," said John Walker, manager of Perforce's Partner and Integration Program. "This integration once again demonstrates that Perforce's flexible architecture can support best of breed technologies like Hansoft".

The integration is certified by Perforce and provides full real-time synchronization of data between Hansoft and Perforce. Not only is the integration ready-made, but also very fast and easy to setup for the user. One important feature is the ability to configure the integration uniquely per project in Hansoft. In this way, different projects can have different sets of data synchronized.

“With the outstanding performance and functionality of Hansoft and Perforce tightly integrated, teams will now benefit from a scalable and easy solution leveraging productivity to new levels in agile and lean software development,” said Hansoft CEO Patric Palm.

About Perforce

Perforce, the Fast Software Configuration Management System, is an award-winning tool that versions and manages source code and digital assets for enterprises large and small. Perforce is easy to install, learn and administer; seamlessly handles distributed development; and supports developers across a large number of platforms. Perforce ensures development integrity by grouping multi-file updates into atomic changes, enables concurrent development, and intelligently manages multiple software releases using its Inter-File Branching™ system.

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"At 2K Games, quality is paramount in all of our games. Modern game development is about iteration, agility, tuning and balancing. We have found Hansoft to be an impressive tool to help us do just that. It provides scheduling models we rely on, and streamlines communication, reporting and efficiency for our publishing group," said John Chowanec, Development Director at 2K Games.

Hansoft is an integrated project management solution that builds on principles of team empowerment, increased communication, transparency and collaboration. The tool is used by developers in over 20 countries around the world, for agile and lean development, collaborative scheduling, bug tracking and workload coordination.

John Chowanec continued: "The fact that Hansoft is developed by a team that understands the challenges of game development is a huge bonus. Their speed of response on support issues is refreshing and their customer service is absolutely fantastic."

"Fast and open communication is one of the key principles behind the Hansoft tool but also fundamental in our interaction with the rapidly growing community of Hansoft users. Continuous feedback and discussions with clients around the world like 2K Games helps us to calibrate existing features and create new, powerful tools. It's exciting to see that Hansoft is now being used by 2K Games and we look forward to our continued relationship," said Hansoft CEO, Patric Palm.

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"As a rapidly growing studio we needed a server based project management solution that could support internally and externally driven projects and was easy to adapt to our iterative development process - Hansoft delivered. In the short time we have had Hansoft deployed, it has already increased productivity, communication and visibility across our entire team. The new pipeline and workflow tool has allowed Harmonix to automate many of our repetitive and time consuming production tasks into a streamlined process that the development team has direct interaction with," said Michael Verrette, Director of Production, Harmonix Music Systems.

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Haraldur D Thorvaldsson has been hired as a Senior Software Engineer at Hansoft. A recent PhD graduate in Computer Science from Washington University in St. Louis, Haraldur previously worked in Iceland as a developer at OZ.COM and later served as CTO for SmartVR, designing software for multi-user virtual 3D worlds.

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"Hansoft is a great asset to Curve Studios, helping us keep our commitment of constantly delivering high quality titles. We've found it a powerful tool that facilitates both Agile and Waterfall methodologies, and use it across multiple projects. Hansoft's ease of use allows for rapid planning, and really helps to empower the team by giving them a constantly updated list of what their tasks are on different levels of granularity, as well as keeping them in touch with the projects' bigger picture," said Graeme Puttock - Head of Production at Curve Studios.

Hansoft is a project management tool used by developers in more than 20 countries around the globe. The ability to handle both Agile and scheduling projects keeps all teams on track and the project managers can easily follow the progress. Hansoft also takes resource management to a new dimension, making it easier to keep costs down, hit deadlines and ship better games faster.

"Over allocation used to be a typical problem when working over multiple projects. The difficulties to coordinate teams and maximise resources we saw among our customers, inspired us to develop a powerful resource management tool in Hansoft. I get constantly surprised over the amount of time and money that can be saved, simply by using existing resources in a more efficient way. Curve is an excitng studio and I'm really curious to see what they'll come up with in the future," said Hansoft CEO Patric Palm.

About Curve Studios

Curve Studios is an independent video games developer based in Angel, central London. The studio was formed by experienced industry veterans in 2005 with the aim of establishing itself as a major development force and preferred development partner. Having completed multiple projects across leading handheld and home consoles, Curve continues its mission to guarantee the highest quality products, delivered on time and to budget. www.curve-studios.com

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Hansoft 5.3 contains a number of improvements. One of the most significant is the asset pipeline tool, a feature many developers have been waiting for.

"We have had in-depth discussions with studios for quite some time on how to take the heavy manual work out of managing asset pipelines. Many teams are also experiencing that it's hard to combine an agile process like scrum with the linear nature of asset creation. This became a large and very exiting research project on our side and we are now releasing Hansoft 5.3 where art pipelines can be created in parallel with sign-off workflows to make asset creation more lean," said Hans Andersson, Development Director at Hansoft.

Developers in over 20 countries are using Hansoft for collaborative scheduling, agile, bug tracking and workload coordination. Hansoft is also used on multi site projects, to keep close contacts and daily discussions between teams, even though the geographical distance may be large.

"Every day we get large amounts of great feedback from clients that we use to continuously make improvements of Hansoft. Some updates are small but significant for the everyday user experience and some are large, like the new report generator. That was originally based on feedback from QA managers that wanted the reporting in the bug database part of Hansoft to be more powerful," Said Hans Andersson.

New features in Hansoft 5.3:

• Asset pipeline tool that can manage complex, parallel, and nested flows of art creation in both agile and scheduling projects.
• Workflows tool to edit and apply a workflow on any kind of item in Hansoft. Use it for art sign off, quality iterations or user story testing.
• New report generator. Create and share reports with co-workers using Hansoft's visual query builder, new query language and grouping functionality.
• Updated integration SDK. Access and use pipelines, workflows and reports in a simple manner in the SDK. This enables advanced integration with asset management systems as well as making it easier to integrate Hansoft with external report systems such as executive dashboards and business intelligence tools
• Many improvements on the agile and QA feature sets in Hansoft to make everyday usage of Hansoft even smoother.
• Performance enhancements. Less time to synchronize when you connect to the Hansoft server. Handling a large number of documents over global distances is faster.

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"The way Hansoft enables instant and clear communication to the teams has made it easier to manage resources and avoid over allocation or planning conflicts. It helps us getting the job done and deliver on time," said YAGER Managing Director Timo Ullmann.

Hansoft combines a user friendly interface design with the capabilities of instant and visual communication. The project manager has the resource usage of individual team members updated in real time, which makes it easy for managers to get an overview of the project and follow the progress.

Hansoft CEO Patric Palm comments: "Productivity is important for leading studios like YAGER Development, and resource management is an important corner stone. Hansoft gives the project manager an updated overview of all work allocated to individual resources, resource groups and projects. The managers get a live pulse on the project to better manage towards critical milestones and ship on time."

About YAGER Development
YAGER Development is an independent videogame developer based in Berlin, Germany.
Founded in 1999, the studio is dedicated to creating AAA action-loaded games with a rich player experience, competitive technology and high-quality presentation. www.yager-development.com

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"What doesn't bend, breaks. Hansoft is ideal for game industry development because it provides flexibility for shifting priorities and goals through highly intuitive and usable interface design. The ability to easily manage resources for projects, customize the production style and views per project and user, and quickly see resource conflicts, workloads and costs continues to impress me daily. Overall, Hansoft's integration of the scheduling, reporting and bug tracking systems, with large scale multi-user role based architecture, makes it an excellent single tool solution for the full production pipeline," said Mike Hines, Project Director at Epic Games China.

Hansoft is a fully integrated production management tool, used by a rapidly increasing number of studios in more than 20 countries for project management, bug tracking and workload coordination. Hansoft makes it possible to run scheduling and agile projects in one single tool. It empowers teams to ship better games faster and provides management with a project status overview updated in real time.

"Improved collaboration and flexibility are fundamental principles behind Hansoft. Using a tool that truly empowers teams is key when focusing on productivity to get the most out of their talent. I'm really happy to work with Epic Games China and see Hansoft put into action in their exciting projects," said Hansoft CEO Patric Palm.

About Epic Games China
Epic Games China based in Shanghai, China licenses Epic Games' Unreal Engine 2 and Unreal Engine 3 in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and South East Asia. The company provides local technology support and professional training services in Mandarin and English. Epic Games China also offers AAA quality content production outsourcing and game development services to developers and publishers worldwide. www.epicgameschina.com

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Anders Wass has been hired as a Software Integration Engineer at Hansoft. His most recent employment was with Init, Stockholm.

John Broome has started as a Solution and Sales Manager at Hansoft. His most recent employment was with E*TRADE Australia.

Parul Sharma has been recruited as a Solution and Sales Manager at Hansoft. Her most recent employment was at Philips Electronics India.

Erik Ellingsen is filling the new position of IT Operations Manager at Hansoft. His most recent employment was with Connecta consulting, Stockholm.

Julia Hallin has started as a Marketing and PR-Manager at Hansoft. Her most recent employment was with VisitSweden, New York.

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