Resource Topic: Enterprise Architecture

The Client

This Cprime client is one of the world’s foremost networking hardware, software, and telecommunications equipment providers. Since 1984, it has created an expansive portfolio of routers, switches, wireless access points, security products, collaboration tools, managed services, and IoT applications.

Today, the California-based technology company operates in over 100 countries. Recognized for its innovations and commitment to delivering high-quality products and services, the company serves a variety of data-intensive industries, including healthcare, finance, education, and government.

The company reported revenues of over $51 billion in 2022.

The Challenge: Finding a Common Language and Reconnecting Siloed Teams

Because of the size of its workforce and complex portfolio of products and services, the network and communications provider faced a set of challenges typical of many established enterprises. Decades of growth and incremental process changes had created a disconnect between its leadership, departments, and teams.

“Over the years, the company adopted a variety of tools and frameworks—everyone interacted and worked differently,” explains Chuck Badger, Managing Director at Cprime. “If a developer transferred from one business unit to another, they had to start over, both from a tooling and a process perspective.”

“It’s a common dilemma for organizations of this scale,” adds Elida Parish, Managing Director of Customer Success at Cprime. “Throughout the company, they developed pockets of people using different tools and trying different things. Every team had adopted its own process. Moving from area to area, they were speaking past each other—not even using the same terminology.”

 

“Every team had adopted its own way of working. Moving from area to area, they were speaking past each other—not even using the same terminology.” — Elida Parish, Cprime, Managing Director, Customer Success

 

Increasing Transparency to Improve Strategic Planning

Besides creating communication issues, the information silos between areas hindered the company executive’s efforts to evaluate the business and plan strategically. The lack of visibility affected the company’s time to market and its ability to plan and invest in future initiatives. Declining quality and increasing costs and delivery times across the organization were also key concerns.

“With everybody on a different page, there was no way for the company to roll up consistent reporting,” explains John Kosco, Cprime Enterprise Agile Transformation Consultant. “They just didn’t have visibility into what was happening in their different agile teams. They needed to raise transparency so leadership could prioritize and manage portfolios to ensure that everyone was doing the right work. And, they had to implement a unified framework to ensure the work was being done right.”

“Leadership recognized that they had to standardize,” says Parish. “The goal was to improve throughput and deliver value faster by adopting a cloud-first, single project management framework, to drive alignment by moving disconnected teams onto a centralized tech stack, and to more effectively identify and meet business needs by creating a unified picture of the business.”

Besides aligning its teams under a standard framework using a central tool, the company wanted to move its infrastructure online to take greater advantage of cloud technologies.

The Solution: Cprime Cross-Functional Teams for Holistic Cultural and Technical Transformation

To accomplish its goals, the company needed to perform three core tasks—promote a common, internally developed agile framework, onboard a centralized platform as a single source of truth for reporting and project management, and migrate all production data onto that platform and into the cloud without disrupting the business. It was a hybrid initiative—both cultural and technical—affecting the company’s largest engineering groups, and thousands of people.

 

“Cprime was there to help the company find the best approaches to solve its problems and act as a sounding board to help build the internal capability to enable its teams long term.” — Dan Weikart, Cprime Director & Enterprise Agile Coach

 

“The agile transformation addresses the organization’s cultural mindset and processes,” explains Anthony Crain, Cprime Business Agility Coach. “The Jira Cloud migration and technical tooling transformation provide a standardized platform for the teams to break down the work, identify strengths and weaknesses, and give management insight into exactly what the teams are doing to achieve the company’s desired business outcomes.”

Enabling Cultural Change with the PRIME Approach

The network communications provider turned to Cprime to enable the multi-faceted transformation. It was a decision driven by over a decade of experience working with Cprime as a partner for change within the organization.

“Cprime’s method, PRIME—Prepare, Roadmap, Iterate, Measure, Enable— aligned perfectly with the company’s goals,” says Kosco. “We formed a collaboration infrastructure where the Cprime coaches and cross-functional teams provided the resources to help the company implement a common agile taxonomy. In practical terms, Cprime was there to help them find the best approaches to solve problems, and to act as a sounding board to help them build the internal capability to enable their teams long term.”

Creating a Template for Agile Unity

Using the PRIME approach, Cprime prepared for the agile transformation by meeting with the company leaders to establish a blueprint for forming and educating teams and teams of teams within the organization. With an approved roadmap in place, Cprime began coaching teams on how to execute a new way of working using the new Jira Cloud tools.

“As coaches, Cprime engaged with the leaders and the teams, acting as a translation layer between theory and practice,” says Weikart. “We presented the new ways of working in a consistent, practical fashion that rolled up across the organization.”

Besides traditional instructor-led, role-based workshops, Cprime worked with the company to create 27 Learning Bytes—short guides that reinforce context-specific agile principles and practices. Another eight Agile Primers provide detailed, always-available references that clarify core agile roles and processes. Over 18 months, Cprime’s on-the-ground coaching team expanded from 3 to over 30 members.

 

“Because of the combined agile and tooling initiatives, positive change is visible everywhere. We delivered growth in earnings, revenue, and each of our key transformation metrics.” — Executive Sponsor

 

A Technical Jira Cloud Migration to Support a New Agile Methodology

Parallel to the coaches propagating the company’s new agile methodology, the Cprime Customer Success team worked to establish a Jira Cloud environment to centralize reporting and portfolio management, and to foster further alignment.

Leveraging their expertise as an Atlassian Platinum Solution Partner, the Cprime Customer Success team worked to onboard the provider’s teams to its new Jira Cloud infrastructure. This included overseeing a complex data migration from disparate on-site Jira instances.

“In many cases, the Jira data was already there,” says Parish. “But it wasn’t a simple matter of just lifting and shifting the data to the cloud. They were bringing together all their different tools and migrating them into Jira Align.”

Collaborating for Optimal Outcomes

To ensure a successful migration, the multi-disciplinary Cprime team coordinated across time zones to maintain the integrity of the migrated data. The entire process required constant cooperation between the networking provider and the Cprime Customer Success team.

“Not only was Cprime migrating live data, we had to make sure we weren’t stepping on anyone’s toes as they used the system. They had many scrum and kanban boards in production that contained broken workflow validators and other issues. Those needed to be addressed before migration,” says Parish. “To accommodate their data in the cloud, we had to create customizations and methodically massage the live data to avoid duplications. Post migration, clean-up involved working hand-in-hand with the client to reconcile and map the new data meaningfully.”

Working together and communicating internally, the different Cprime teams could avoid issues common to projects involving multiple vendors.

Results: Unprecedented Levels of Visibility, Traceability, and Communication

By overseeing both the migration and the agile transformation, Cprime was in an ideal position to ensure the networking communications provider’s new Jira Cloud infrastructure aligned with its goals and the updated development framework. The combined results have given the company an unprecedented view into its workflows and allowed them to make new strategic connections.

“The insights and synergy the company gained by combining both the tooling transformation and on-the-ground agile coaching provided an exponential return on their investment,” says Parish. “By blending the perspectives, Cprime has helped them see their data in new ways and align more effectively with their other efforts to achieve new levels of visibility and traceability.”

Quantifying Rapid Cultural Change

Using the new tooling and agile methodology, the network communications provider successfully launched over 400 well-formed agile teams—roughly 2,800 Cisco employees—in a single quarter. 90% of those teams aligned their long-standing backlogs with management’s newly formed strategic themes. To assist the transformation, Cprime coaches led 18 role-specific training sessions, training 525 people in under six months. This enabled the company to pursue other internal training initiatives. Overall, Cprime significantly accelerated the company’s ability to deploy a new way of working across its teams.

“They had a highly fractured working environment,” says Weikart. “Now, they have a unified but flexible working environment where everyone speaks the same language, sees consistent information, and is on a path that suits their specific context.”

Increasing Throughput and Accelerating Delivery Schedules and Response Times

With improved collaboration and transparency, the company has also seen an increase in throughput across multiple product lines, accelerated delivery schedules, and improved response times to customer support inquiries. It is continuing to work with Cprime to further transform the organization.

“Because of the combined agile and tooling initiatives, positive change is visible everywhere,” remarks an executive sponsor. “We delivered growth in earnings, revenue, and each of our key transformation metrics. We have even raised our outlook for the next fiscal year because of our healthy backlog and the steps we have taken to improve.”

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About Georgia United Credit Union (GUCU)

Georgia United is one of the largest and strongest credit unions in Georgia. They serve over 150,000 members with innovative digital banking solutions, full-service branches, and 100,000 surcharge-free ATMs across the globe. They provide “banking experiences that allow you to live your best life.”

The Challenge

Georgia United Credit Union (GUCU) had resource constraints and limited experience in migrating Atlassian applications from Server to the Atlassian Cloud. The complexity of their Jira Service Management instances and related integrations made it critical that the migration was executed meticulously. Additionally, being a nationally regulated financial firm, many security protocols had to be adhered to and met from end to end.

The Solution

Migrating to Atlassian Cloud would allow Georgia United Credit Union to deprecate their existing infrastructure and mitigate the related security risks and concerns. Additional cost savings would be realized, as there would be no infrastructure or support costs in Atlassian Cloud.

The Benefits

Financial Impact

GUCU realized significant TCO reduction by going to Atlassian Cloud. As a result of the migration, on-prem infrastructure was decommissioned, and the engineers supporting it were freed up to do other high-value activities.

Security Risks

Security concerns have been alleviated by migrating to Atlassian Cloud; there are no longer any outages to patch operating systems and remediated CVE vulnerabilities, keeping the company and its data more secure.

Latest & Greatest

Once in Atlassian Cloud, all upgrades happen behind the scenes with no need for GUCU to involve technical resources to plan and perform the upgrades, or coordinate the downtime with the rest of the company.

About Cprime and AWS

Cprime is a strategic consulting company specializing in Agile and DevOps transformations. Cprime holds the following partnerships—SAFe® Gold Partner (Agile), Atlassian Platinum Partner (DevOps), and AWS Advanced Tier Consulting Partner (Cloud)—a claim no other firm in the world can make.

Cprime participates in the AWS ISV Workload Migration Program, AWS Solution Provider Program, and AWS Well-Architected Partner Program. In addition, Cprime has achieved its AWS DevOps Competency and is pursuing a Migration Competency, while actively delivering services to customers.

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The Client

Established in 2002 by sports enthusiasts wanting a rugged, compact, and easy-to-use method of capturing high-quality video in extreme environments, this Cprime client sets the gold standard in the industry.

Today, the market has grown to $3 billion, and this company has captured one-third of global sales — over $1 billion in both 2021 and 2022.

The Challenge: Improving Poor Application Performance and Overcoming Sluggish Vendor Support on a Tight Timeline

Action cameras occupy an extremely competitive market expected to reach over $7 billion before 2030. This rapid revenue growth is due to the professional and consumer appetite for versatile, feature-rich cameras and lenses with ever-increasing resolution and video quality.

To remain at the top of the market, the camera manufacturer sought to update its infrastructure. All in all, the goal was to enhance team collaboration, eliminate organizational silos, facilitate employee access to proprietary resources, address efficiency issues, and speed product development.

To achieve this, however, the company faced multiple challenges. These included the poor historical performance of its legacy Jira and Confluence applications.

Sluggish Vendor Support

“The biggest pain point was the hoops they had to jump through to troubleshoot or even locate specific data,” explains Crystal Zapata, Cprime Technical Project Manager.

 

“We went from waiting a day or more to receive support responses to receiving them within hours — much better than before. The support requests we see now are about the applications’ enhanced functionality rather than their poor performance.” — Company Project Sponsor

 

The provider’s declining service frequently resulted in multi-day delays in response to simple support requests. With teams from multiple disciplines working from locations around the globe, time differences only compounded the issue. The delays affected everyone, from the company’s developers to its sales partners and customer service agents.

Poor Application Performance

Additionally, the solutions themselves — poorly configured instances of the normally reliable Atlassian Jira and Confluence — were not performing well, causing productivity issues and frustration.

“They wanted ownership of a streamlined, systematic, and cloud-based process that worked without submitting a support ticket and waiting days for a response, and a reliable Jira dashboard and Confluence reports that everyone—from their manufacturing team members and development project managers up to their CEO and CIOs—could look at and say, ‘This is where we’re at, this is what we’re tracking.’ ”

A Tight Schedule — Shifting Data at Scale without Interrupting Critical Workflows

Challenges also grew from the sheer volume of data to migrate and the technical and logistical demands of delivering functioning Jira and Confluence cloud applications.

“We usually try to fit each migration into a single weekend to avoid disruption, but there was so much data that a Saturday and Sunday weren’t enough,” says Yevgen Lasman, Cprime Data Migration engineer. “From a technical perspective, they required extensive customizations with interlocking dependencies, including a complex repository of proprietary mathematical formulas and important technical documentation. We also had to work with their third-party vendors and application suppliers to identify and address issues as they arose.”

The timing was critical. Due to the seasonal nature of their business, the migration had to occur without disrupting revenue or production during the peak product development and sales cycles.

“Finding the right time to make it all happen was key,” says Zapata. “Everything had to fit into a window immediately after their development freeze time and just before the busiest time of the year.”

Solution: A Cprime-Atlassian Platinum Partnership for Cloud Migration Success

The camera manufacturer decided to take control of its data by migrating their legacy Jira and Confluence applications to Atlassian Cloud hosting. To solve its migration challenges and ensure the process went smoothly, the company engaged an experienced, full service global Atlassian Enterprise Platinum Solution Partner. Specifically, Cprime was the ideal candidate to extend the client’s Atlassian toolset with expertise in accredited services, application integrations, training, and custom solutions.

To start the transformation, the Cprime migration team formed a comprehensive action plan beginning with a deep-dive audit. Consequently, over three weeks, they worked with the manufacturer’s steering committee, network specialists, technical project managers, and product stakeholders to assess its peer data, add-ons, and potential risks.

“Together, we identified their Atlassian application layouts and mappings and determined the most effective way to migrate their customizations, applications, and journal components,” says Zapata. “This included forming a plan for migrating the data the company had in use and important archival data from early camera iterations that they needed to keep for reference.”

A Flexible Migration Plan for Real-World Conditions

Once the manufacturer’s teams approved the migration roadmap, Cprime began iteration testing to identify potential pain points and establish realistic timelines for each phase of the move to the cloud.

“Finding the right time to make it all happen was key. Everything had to fit into a window immediately after their development freeze time and just before the busiest time of the year.” — Crystal Zapata, Cprime Technical Project Manager

“Migrating production systems, there is always an element of risk, but we mitigate that as much as possible,” says Zapata. “Here, we stepped the client through our test iterations, ensured the stakeholders understood and approved the process, and provided their business units with a clear schedule.”

Throughout the migration, the Cprime team remained flexible, adjusting the strategy and timelines to align with the manufacturer’s shifting production schedules.

“We were ready to go live in September, but, for business reasons including the peak sales season over Black Friday and Christmas, the manufacturer froze systematic changes to its production environments,” says Lasman. “We altered the roadmap to fit their timeframe. In the meantime, we laid everything out and tested it to ensure the company had the confidence to move forward when they were ready.”

With such large volumes of data involved, the scheduled migration intervals often exceeded low-activity periods between Friday evening and Monday morning. When work bled into the busier periods, Cprime ensured that the system remained unaffected by shifting only low-impact archived data that did not affect business activities or application performance.

Continued Support

Cprime support continued after the camera manufacturer signed off on the migration.

“We stayed on site for an additional two weeks, providing bespoke training documentation explaining changes to the process flow to avoid confusion,” Zapata says.

Results: Improved Issue Resolution, Application Performance, and Data Security

Despite the challenges, the company saw immediate results from its Jira and Confluence cloud migration.

Greater Visibility and Control

Taking control of their hosting and system administration provided the first set of benefits.

“They now have access to advanced features of Atlassian Cloud,” says Zapata. “They can also leverage customizations the cloud offers that their legacy provider couldn’t.”

More Responsive Customer Support

By switching to direct Enterprise tier Atlassian support rather than going through a third party, the company has seen response times to support tickets improve radically. Application speeds have also increased with internal and external Jira Service Management users describing the performance as “snappy.”

“We went from waiting a day or more to receiving support responses within hours — much better than before. We are very happy with the changes,” says a project sponsor. “The support requests we see now are about the applications’ enhanced functionality rather than its poor performance.”

Data Security and Application Performance Gains

Moving its Jira and Confluence data to the cloud also improved data access and security. By migrating its data, the camera manufacturer added a layer of protection through the redundancy and fail-over protection characteristic of managed cloud solutions.

Based on the results of the camera manufacturer’s cloud transformation, the company continues to turn to Cprime regularly for insights into its next steps.

“Even with the move to the cloud complete, we frequently meet with the company to discuss new use cases and advancements in the software,” says Zapata. “Cprime is happy to be on board to help them navigate future upgrades.”

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Overview

Croesus has spent thirty years building a solid international reputation based largely on its cutting-edge proprietary wealth management software solution. Their clients account for over a trillion dollars in assets managed with the Croesus solutions, so their development team has a heavy responsibility to maintain continuous security and efficiency. 

As a staunch advocate of Lean/Agile development practices, the Croesus development team relies heavily on Atlassian products, Jira and Confluence, to support their planning and day-to-day operations. Seeking the enhanced reliability, security, and functionality available on the Atlassian Cloud platform, they determined to undertake a migration to the cloud. We had a GO!

Cprime Canada enjoys a position as the leading cloud migration partner with hundreds of successful migrations under our belt. But, according to Croesus sponsor, that wasn’t the key deciding factor when they chose to partner with Cprime.

“Cprime advocates Agile and DevOps principles; that’s how they approach each project and journey. I knew that we’d be able to partner closely with Cprime without having to sacrifice our internal processes or be a burden on the team. They could meet us where we were, empower the team, and share that knowledge in terms of workflow, making for a smooth and successful migration.”

Marie-Christine Legault (M.C.), Cprime’s account liaison and Head of Canada, concurs. “It was important from the start for us to work with a practical and actionable plan for Croesus. We wanted to ensure workFLOW and that we worked as ONE unit with our Migration Team and the Croesus Team. We could adapt schedules and key steps to accommodate each member of their migration team in a trustful manner.”

“I knew that we’d be able to partner closely with Cprime without having to sacrifice our internal processes or be a burden on the team. They could meet us where we were, empower the team, and share that knowledge in terms of workflow, making for a smooth and successful migration.”

The Solution

Over a three-month period, Cprime and Croesus collaborated to complete a successful migration to Atlassian Cloud and licensing agreement. And, we put together a wonderful world renowned roster of guest keynotes and Cprime speakers for an insightful DevOps/Agile full-day event for employees.

Communication was key

One of the first steps in the process was to set up a Google Chat group including all members of the Cprime and Croesus teams so we could work closely to accommodate professional and personal agendas. This was key for maximum efficiency and real time management for all.

“The chat group was instrumental in maintaining communication and transparency from the start,” M.C. Legault says. “Everyone felt free to ask questions on the fly and this allowed us to make decisions that shortened the time frame, lessened risk, and gave visibility to all. The chat brought us together as one unit for the duration of the project and beyond. We got along well — a true international collaboration as we had our expert teammates working from our four Cprime Global offices.”

Starting with a good cup of coffee, we planned a great strategy

The initial conversations were followed by a lightweight assessment to ensure a thorough understanding of the client’s existing systems and how they interacted with the data. Yevgen Lasman, an Atlassian Tools/Migration Specialist with Cprime, recalls, “Croesus was working with a few instances of Jira already in the cloud and one on-premise. So, we developed a migration strategy that would begin with a consolidation, a testing timeline, then a full migration of all data to the new cloud instance.”

Incorporating add-ons

They also relied on a few Jira add-on applications that had to be factored into the plans. Chief among them was Xray, which they were using for test management. Since Xray is available on the cloud, the add-on data could be smoothly parceled along with the main data migration.

Software licensing and BIG savings

Cprime Licensing Team was working behind the scenes and assisted with selecting the optimal licensing options for the new Atlassian Cloud software instances, even finding a way that was more economical for Croesus. They continue to manage the licenses as needed.

A Spring Break migration weekend

With the preliminary planning, consolidation, and test migrations complete, the production migration occurred over the course of one weekend in March of 2022. 

Yevgen Lasman recalls, “In the first moments of the migration, we had a few little hiccups that were identified and expected, but we were able to resolve everything safely on the spot. Both teams were all hands on deck for the smooth ride of the migration. When Monday came around, everyone was charged up and in shape.” Job done and high five TEAMS.

The Croesus project sponsor says, “During the sprint demo, our internal team
would highlight a few impediments or little issues that had come up. The says, “During the sprint demo, our internal team would highlight a few impediments or little issues that had come up. The teams were always able to resolve everything with Cprime quickly and completely. Challenges were immediately followed up with a solid plan for mitigating the risk and moving continuously ahead. I never needed to fix anything myself or get involved or participate in weekly project meetings; I never had to worry about it or put out any fires, which confirmed to me that we’d chosen the right partner. As an executive sponsor, that made my job so much easier.”

M.C. Legault agrees. “Letting our teams be hands-on, identifying what needs to be done, and empowering them was at the heart of this partnership. That’s really the value of working side-by-side and becoming one team and listening. We’ve done so many of these migrations, licensing deals, with add-ons and plugins, we’ve truly seen it all. But what needs to shine is our mindset and transparency with the Croesus team …there is a lot of value when you build a relationship and trustful collaboration.”

“The teams were always able to resolve everything with Cprime quickly and completely… I never needed to fix anything myself or get involved or participate in weekly project meetings; I never had to worry about it or put out any fires, which confirmed to me that we’d chosen the right partner. As an executive sponsor, that made my job so much easier.”

The Results

The migration to Atlassian Cloud was completed successfully and rapidly. A solid result is that Croesus has since decommissioned their on-premise servers, lessening internal infrastructure, and is working completely on the cloud platform. 

The development team reports a seamless transition with no impact on their workflow, lots of learning, and new skill sets that were shared by the Cprime migration team. Now, Croesus is benefiting from the platform’s enhanced security and performance without compromising functionality.

Croesus concludes, “Cprime collaborated closely with our team, working in an Agile fashion the entire time. Communication, well-being, and transparency were a constant, and any issues were quickly resolved — from technical challenges to scheduling conflicts, and everything in between. We couldn’t be happier with how the project played out.”

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