The HG Blog

So now that things have been settled with HG’s identity, it’s time to go on to the fun stuff: the staff system! Woo!

It’s been discussed in a previous blog post that HeavenGames doesn’t operate as efficiently as it could from a staff perspective. A lot of issues have already been dealt with in the past several months, but there are two substantial problems that must be taken care of. First, there is no effective way to ensure quality and consistency of work across all of our sites. Second, we do not have dedicated jobs in a number of support capacities, including marketing, sales, and the like.

Revamped Staff System

The owners have thus discussed the issue with the HeavenGames staff and have come up with the following system:

As you can see, HeavenGames will still be run fundamentally the same: the Exco - chaired by the CEO - makes all of the network-wide administrative decisions and Seraphs work under the Exco as site administrators. What will be added to the system will be a Seraph Liaison and Support Departments. First, the Seraph Liaison. In addition to being a member of the Exco, they will have the following responsibilities:

• Trains seraphs.
• Ensures our websites are in compliance with our vision (constantly updated, forums friendly to all users, involve visitors and entice them to participate, community forums are tended to, etc.)
• Develops programs to better serve the community (get staff to host more contests/tournaments, figure out strategy to encourage community participation, etc.)

The Seraph Liaison will work with the Seraphs to make their sites the best possible; they will help the Seraphs set specific goals for their sites and will help the Seraphs achieve them.

Next, the Support Departments. Support Departments will take care of a number of jobs that need to be handled for HG to be successful. These will be headed by a Department Head, which will need to ensure that their department - through their plan and staff - takes care of the following responsibilities:

Operations/Human Resources

• Manages all staff through seraphs/department heads.
• Manages staff system.
  • Benefits
  • Conflicts
• Ensures all sites are fully-staffed
• Organizes new site formation
  • Chooses seraphs
  • Chooses staff - if seraph is absent
  • Gets support from support department heads - marketing, creative, etc - if seraph is absent.

CTO/Tech

• New site technology
• New product technology
• Technology maintenance

Marketing/PR

• Guerilla marketing - Facebook, signatures, YouTube, etc.
• Advertising purchases
• Mentions in press
• Getting interviews
• Fellow community site relations

Business Development

• Business partnerships
• Bundling
• Sponsorships
• Developer exclusives
• Beta test hosting

Finance

• Advertising sales
• Investments
• Accounting
• Manage all HG contest prizes (receipt and distribution)
• HG merchandise management

Creative

• New site design
• Seraph requests - contest logos, article logos, etc
• Department Head requests - powerpoint designs, cover letters, etc

Seraph Liaison, Support Department Heads, and the Exco

As the diagram indicates, the Seraph Liaison and Support Department Heads will all be on the Exco to make sure that their perspective from their unique positions at HG are properly addressed in pan-HG administration. The Exco’s responsibilities are in two basic categories: day-to-day administration (staff approvals, Seraph administration issues, etc) and larger HG policy (legal issues, HG’s identity, staff setup, etc). The biggest influence that the non-shareholding Exco members will have will be with day-to-day administration, where two votes are needed for action to be taken. For larger HG policy, the vote will ultimately need to be made by the shareholders simply because of how the company needs to function. However, the opinion of the non-shareholders will be very heavily considered and gone against only in extreme circumstances, so they will still have substantial influence in that respect as well. This will also ensure that committee gridlock will likely not happen as the decisions in day-to-day administration and larger policy will ultimately be decided by small groups of people.

That’s the basic staff system that has been set up by HeavenGames’ staff and owners; if you have any questions, critiques, or suggestions, don’t hesitate to contact me at socvazius@heavengames.com.

What’s coming next? The implementation of all of these grand plans I’ve set before everyone here. New stuff will come as things develop (especially as support departments get underway and start managing their own plans, but for now I’m just going to be trying to make sure everything runs as smoothly as possible.

Autobots, roll out!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 10th, 2007 at 4:40 pm and is filed under Major Announcements. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.