Overview
In the ever-changing world of IT, an organization's ability to perform cross-functionally and manage work to meet business demands is imperative to overall business success. Our client, who partners with leading health plans, healthcare providers, biotechnology, and pharmaceutical companies, wanted to bring in a professional services organization with in-depth expertise of Agile frameworks within the Atlassian ecosystem to evaluate their current usage of their Atlassian tools. Upon initial deployment of the Atlassian product suite, our client mostly leveraged out-of-the-box solutions based on Atlassian's recommendations, which had worked in the short-term but lacked scalability in critical areas as internal needs and priorities shifted towards broader organizational goals (including SAFe®).
THE CHALLENGE
As with many organizations that we have engaged with, our client understood that their current tool-set had the potential to scale and support their business process at a high-level, but they needed the foundational direction and expertise to leverage those tools and standard methodologies that would allow them to scale their business.
THE SOLUTION
Praecipio engaged in a three-week Agile Process Assessment, which focused on evaluating their processes, Atlassian product usage, and what deployment tools supported Agile processes.
The Agile Process Assessment consisted of on-site and virtual meetings with various groups, such as Scrum Masters, Tech Leads, Infrastructure, QA, and Finance, to name a few. During these meetings, each group went into detail about their current processes and how they interact with the Atlassian products. Based on these interviews, we provided the teams with a comprehensive document that mapped out challenges and recommendations for scaling their Agile principles.
THE RESULTS
Key takeaways of the knowledge base transfer document were:
- An outline of how to plan in an Agile manner by leveraging Aha! and Jira
- Aligning Product Verticals and general services to Jira Projects
- Analysis of current issue types and workflows and recommendations for ease-of-use
- Configuration changes that will provide better reporting from Jira
- How to best leverage Confluence to support products and teams
- End-user training that would be beneficial for teams
- Additional considerations such as hosting options and ongoing outside support
- A roadmap identifying which action items our client should work on first based on their strategic objectives
Afterward, our client expressed extreme gratitude for their experience with the engagement and mentioned that their organization has a clear vision and roadmap of what they need to execute based on priority and overall strategy. What would have taken the client 8-12 months to complete internally, we were able to condense into a three-week engagement, giving them back 92% of their time. This had a significant impact on full-time employee hours and dependencies on the timeline towards a solution. In regards to post-engagement next steps, our client will leverage Praecipio's additional consulting services to execute specific time-consuming activities to assist with implementing some of the changes that we recommended.
