They moved to the AWS cloud for standardization, visibility and alignment

Overview

This organization has a strategic business objective of improving and automating team collaborations. The company operates in a highly competitive, dynamic and fast changing industry. The ability to respond quickly to disruptive industry forces and react in an agile, rapid and orchestrated way is an essential competence for this organizations wishing to thrive in this ultra competitive ecosystem. The vision included laying solid foundations for an enterprise scale platform and a solution that would be widely adopted and capable of evolving and maturing as their needs evolve. In order to build a truly streamlined and collaborative platform, the solution had to integrate seamlessly with other enterprise tools and applications. The company was looking for a skilled partner with the experience and expertise to deliver the solution.

The requirements for the new platform included:

• Automated reporting for products, portfolios and projects

• Data consistency and governance to facilitate growing operations

• Ability to scale, manage, and optimize tool investment on a strategic roadmap

• Improved adoption of tools for end-to-end collaboration and traceability across project lifecycle

• Build and extend a cohesive software development platform

The Problem

The existing collaboration and work management tools were segmented, operated in isolation with no integration points to other existing systems and applications which prevented the organization from having an overall comprehensive view of the business and effective collaboration between the teams involved in the different activities. The tools could not scale beyond the team level to serve as an enterprise platform. As a result, these existing tools did not allow the organization to meet its business goals nor could it form a part of their emerging cloud strategy.

The organization needed better analytics that would provide improved visibility, traceability combined with better, deeper, and quicker understanding the business. The initiative was championed and funded by the CIO office with the intended users including PPM, PMO and the entire Dev organization.

Adoption of the new platform was a top of mind concern and major priority. Legacy systems proved clunky and inefficient. The user community was chronically unhappy about the overall experience of using the existing systems, about the lack of visibility they provided as well as the poor quality of data. Considerable investment was made therefore in ensuring a smooth user transition.

The Plan

The organization recognized that selecting the right partner and advisor would be key to the success of this strategic initiative. They decided to engaged Cprime to deliver the new platform. The decision was based on Cprime’s experience, reputation and ability to scale. Cprime covers the entire spectrum of services and capabilities that are required for this type of initiative. With a broad range of portfolio of services we established credibility with the organization early on.

Cprime’s initial engagement with the organization began as an assessment. The following year was pivotal in terms of taking the organization through the actual platform transformation and included managed hosting. Shortly after this initial engagement, Cprime continued to advise the organization on their more advanced needs with implementation evolving to advisory and guidance consulting. Cprime provided 10 experts throughout the engagement at any time covering different aspects of skills and expertise needed. The rest of the consulting was on a time in and specialty basis, so experts were brought in as needed with the one embedded person as the ‘boots on the ground’ person.

The Outcome

Throughout the engagement, Cprime was able to bring the right skillset to help the organization to continue, mature and support their initiatives. Cprime successfully completed the following during the engagement:

Migrated software to AWS – allowed better visibility to prioritize and focus on team alignment to work on top strategic priorities as well as reduce internal support costs.
Migrated about 100 projects to Jira – allowed organization to benefit from industry standard and scalable agile management tool, leading to a consolidated work item system to optimize budget/resource allocation.

4 Environments; 15 Production projects; 92 Sandbox projects; 32 Project Admins
Customized and tailored 20+ Jira workflows for over 28 teams’ use for standardization purposes: organization felt that the tool’s functionality met their needs. In addition, many people within the organization were already familiar with Jira and willing to champion it.

The tool was easily adopted as an individual user level tool as well as a team level tool that can scale to an enterprise level.

Cprime and the organization remained very mindful throughout the engagement on how to extend adoption and implemented an overall operationalization or go to market strategy around this platform internally.

Cprime remains a trusted partner and advisor and continues to advise the organization on more sophisticated needs around advance reporting and analytics as well as Knowledge Management.