Wir leben JIRA! JIRA als Ersatz für SAP & Co.

Atlassian User Group Hamburg, Februar 2015

Gerhard Gerner, Head of Project Delivery at Netcentric

JIRA as backbone of a company: How does this work?

Elian Kool, Head of Technology

AGEN

DA

1 How we started

2 Our tools

3 Next steps and conclusion

1 HOW WE STARTED

Netcentric: Who are we?

Netcentric is a leading service provider for the Adobe Marketing Cloud, serving many multi-national brands and corporations

Founded in 2012 with 17 employees, we have grown to 140+ across Europe with HQ in Zürich and near shore development center in Barcelona

Working with many clients in highly regulated environ-ments where we have to pass vendor assess-ments and meet standard usually fulfilled by large companies

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Netcentric / Gerhard Gerner: Who are we?

Besides in our offices in Zurich, Munich, Barcelona and London, we often work with clients on-site – which requires us to be able to perform all tasks independent of any location or availability of a person.

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How we started

We were using JIRA/Confluence already HEAVILY FOR REQUIREMENTS MANAGEMENT, Bug tracking and general task tracking

All our (rather techie driven) employees were USING IT ON A DAILY BASIS

We were using TEMPO TIMESHEETS FOR TIMETRACKING throughout everything from the very beginning – incl. vacations, etc.

Multiple PLUGINS SUCH AS GLIFFY & BALSAMIQ are supporting us in our daily work

We used the rather new ATLASSIAN ONDEMAND offering to jump-start our Atlassian stack

July 2012

How we started

JIRA has been well established as the central tool – the most common answer to a question has become “IT’S IN JIRA/WIKI!”

Due to our demands for custom plugins and a central user management, we moved away from on Demand to an ON-PREMISE INSTALLATION

Replacing HP Quality Center with Zephyr for JIRA for TEST MANAGEMENT

After MANY HEADACHES WITH CROWD (which is badly maintained), we had to develop our own LDAP connector

July 2013

HR management solution incl. asset management

Recruiting platform with more than 1500 candidates in 2 years

Opportunity Management solution

And many more (internal tasks, R&D, etc.)

We‘re using JIRA on a daily basis for different areas

JIRA as all purpose system

Besides this, of course what everyone does: Full project lifecycle management with all our customers

Lot‘s of activity...

2 OUR TOOLS

What is a JIRA Issue?

You can build almost everything with JIRA J

Workflow §  Describes the

necessary steps §  Holds the status

Fields §  Name/Type §  Placement on screens §  Required/optional

Permission §  Who may see what? §  Who may do what?

A piece of Information

CONCLUSION

Recruiting workflow

Recruiting

Recruiting: Our conclusion

Using JIRA for our recruiting has been a DECISION WE NEVER REGRETTED – well accepted and easy to use

§  Can be SOLVED EASILY using JIRA, no special plugins required

§  COMMUNICATION based on comments works very well

§  Very HIGH ACCEPTANCE from the beginning (managed more than 1000 leads within 2 years)

What works §  FLEXIBLE PERMISSIONS, using custom

fields now §  INVOLVEMENT OF RECRUITING

AGENCIES is technically feasible (POC done) but practically limited

What could be improved

OMT Workflow

OMT

OMT: Our conclusion

Our sales is focused on a few large accounts, so OMT basically replaces a central Excel sheet. Basic calculations can easily be made, but it‘s for sure not a full salesforce replacement

§  Can be SOLVED EASILY using JIRA, no special plugins required

§  Using the OMT tickets directly for time booking on small projects

§  CALCULATING BASIC KPIS (e.g. order value/probability)

What works §  Customer – Contract – Tasks, in this case a

further sub-task level would come very handy

§  Tempo Accounts integration

What could be improved

SIMPLE CAPABILITY to enforce employees to accept corporate policies

Process has been ACCEPTED IN A VENDOR ASSESSMENT we had to do with a bank!

HR: Accepting company policies

HR: Asset Management

SIMPLE CAPABILITY to track laptops, phones, licenses, etc.

Has PROVEN ITSELF MANY TIMES (e.g. s/n for stolen or broken devices)

HR

HR: Our conclusion

The HR system allows us to manage everything connected with an employee from contract signature on – incl. ensuring he/she gets the proper Laptop!

§  CREATE AND MANAGE EMPLOYEES (e.g. with automated subtask creation)

§  BASIC PERMISSION MODEL (assignee = manager)

§  Many ASSIGNED SUBTASKS such as Computers, Phones, Reviews, Passport copies, Holidays, sick time, etc.

What works §  INHERITED PERMISSIONS are not possible

(means it’s difficult to build hierarchies…)

What could be improved

3 NEXT STEPS & CONCLUSION

Develop own reports or find a advanced reporting suite for proper project reporting

Optimize the upgrade process – tests on staging and upgrade of all the plugins

Streamline the administration without loosing the flexibly

Improve con-trolling and planning with Tempo Books – we’re waiting for this since a year!

Integration (replacement) of Glassfrog, the system to manage our company

Our Next steps

Future

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Conclusion: JIRA as all purpose system

INTEGRATION WITH CONFLUENCE and the definition where to keep what is stored where quite important (JIRA, Confluence, Alfresco, Glasfrog)

Is it working?

The ACCEPTANCE among our employees is VERY HIGH

JIRA itself doesn’t do the trick – YOU NEED MANY, MANY PLUGINS… this cumulates to a 100k USD investment and will get quite expensive once you need 500+ users

We’re KEEPING SENSITIVE DATA OUT (e.g. salaries) of JIRA due to the limited options with permissions

We NEVER REGRETTED the decision to use JIRA AS OUR ALL PURPOSE SYSTEM

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