Chris Wynn appointment

IGDA Leadership forum, San Francisco – November 12, 2009 - With the recruitment of Chris Wynn as Senior Production Expert, Hansoft now strengthens its productivity consulting services.

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.

Chris Wynn is a Senior Production Expert with Hansoft. His primary role is to help game studios become more productive with their use of Hansoft in their endeavors to create high quality video games. Chris’s background and Hansoft expertise are used to help provide training and consultation services to game studios around the world. With over 12 years of game production experience, he has shipped over a dozen AAA titles on all major platforms, everyone of them delivered on time, on budget, and to defined quality. Prior to joining Hansoft, Chris spent 6 years working directly for EA Sports as a Development Director on franchises like Madden NFL Football. Chris began his career as an artist, but moved quickly into production roles where he got seasoned in both traditional waterfall as well as Lean development and Scrum practices.

“I’m thrilled to join Hansoft, an industry leader in tools and production thinking. Hansoft clients are making some truly great games and to be able to work with them is a great privilege,” said Chris Wynn, Senior Production Expert at Hansoft.

Hansoft Certified Trainer Program

A second 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.

Read more about Hansoft Certified Training program at: www.hansoft.se/certified-trainer

About Hansoft

Hansoft is an integrated solution for agile and lean development, collaborative scheduling, real-time reporting, bug tracking / QA, workload coordination, portfolio and document management, used by the most demanding software developers in more than 20 countries. The tool is fast and easy and builds on principles of team empowerment, increased communication, transparency, and collaboration. New Hansoft 5.3 also includes a pipeline tool to make organizations more lean, a workflow editor for testing, quality iteration and management sign-offs, as well as a new flow-based report generator.

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