U.S. Government Agency Streamlines Reporting & Forecasting with Atlassian Tools

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science sought Praecipio’s expertise in the early stages of their Exascale Computing Project (ECP), a pivotal initiative to maintain the United States' leadership in supercomputing. The project’s ambitious goal was to develop the world's next supercomputer with a capability of 1 Teraflop. Recognizing the complexity of this challenge, the DOE Office of Science turned to Praecipio to ensure that their use of Atlassian tools and IT and SDLC processes were optimized for success.

Praecipio provided essential guidance on best practices and assisted in configuring EazyBI for effective reporting within Jira Software, a critical component for tracking the project's progress against its scope, schedule, and cost objectives. By integrating data from three different sources, including Jira Software, EazyBI helped the ECP team rapidly assess and adjust their strategies, enabling them to establish a baseline schedule within a tight timeframe.

This collaboration supported the DOE’s mission to spearhead advancements in supercomputing. It demonstrated how strategic partnerships and advanced tool configurations can propel such significant projects toward achieving their milestones, reinforcing the United States’ position at the forefront of technological innovation.

The Exascale Computing Project (ECP) had a defined end date and was distributed across National Labs, Universities, and outside vendors and contractors, which made it difficult to enforce standards for the Atlassian tools. In addition, the Application Development and Software Technology structures wanted to implement agile methodologies, while the project was slated to follow a traditional waterfall methodology for project management. 

Through interviews with users and administrators and deep dives into Jira data and EazyBI dashboards, we quickly realized that the data structures in Jira Software and the additional applications in place were not configured to support best practices. This resulted in EazyBI using significant additional processing power to create data cubes for reporting. Finally, the team relied on an Excel workbook converted to CSV to aggregate data from Primavera and the cost accounting system to the tune of 60,000 lines of additional data to report Earned Value and Actual Cost. 

While the Jira instance was relatively small (<10,000 Issues), it was the source of truth for work completion relating back to two other systems. This was then translated into performance metrics shared with the Department of Energy. In short, the data was extremely important for work execution and performance tracking.

Praecipio proposed a two-week IT and SDLC process assessment to address the team’s concerns and advise them on next steps. We analyzed the client’s Atlassian stack to develop a holistic, custom approach for configuring their tools and implementing best practices. 

Our process assessment examined Jira Software, Jira Service Management, and Confluence, as well as the additional data provided by other systems, to help establish best practices. We presented recommendations that, if implemented, would improve ECP’s reporting capabilities specific to project progress and success.

We presented our final recommendations on Day 9 of 10 to allow feedback from ECP. Because of the organization's complicated nature and the hard end date of this specific effort, several nuances had to be incorporated to ensure we were giving the right recommendations.

Praecipio proposed a two-week IT and SDLC process assessment to address the team’s concerns and advise them on next steps. We analyzed the client’s Atlassian stack to develop a holistic, custom approach for configuring their tools and implementing best practices. 

Our process assessment examined Jira Software, Jira Service Management, and Confluence, as well as the additional data provided by other systems, to help establish best practices. We presented recommendations that, if implemented, would improve ECP’s reporting capabilities specific to project progress and success.

We presented our final recommendations on Day 9 of 10 to allow feedback from ECP. Because of the organization's complicated nature and the hard end date of this specific effort, several nuances had to be incorporated to ensure we were giving the right recommendations.