CBG provides effective translation and communication solutions, combined with services to some of the largest automotive and telecom companies in the world.
Challenges
The challenges that CBG experienced were the unnecessary rising of costs and complexity from multiple, disparate IT management tools. Although these tools provided CBG with time, resource and cost management, essential to supporting and increasing IT services to customers, they noticed an imbalance in what was actually needed. Though CBG was using large robust enterprise desktop products (MS Project, Excel), along with some custom online tools (JavaScript, CSS, ASP.NET), this contributed towards a steep learning curve and escalating maintenance costs that detracted both attention and resources from CBG’s core business.
Solutions
After a regular review of CBG’s IT portfolio, along with lessons learned from completed projects and team retrospectives, CBG determined a need for a more effective and efficient time, resource and cost management solution. The aim was for a centralized, minimal-footprint, Jira-integrated solution with proven customer success. After exploring several competitor plugins, CBG was impressed by the numerous advantages of Tempo, as well as the proactive customer outreach. After a few walkthroughs with the Tempo team, CBG was able to quickly and successfully deploy the Tempo suite (Timesheets, Planner, Budgets) within their IT environment in early 2017.
Benefits
Tempo provides CBG with an effective, efficient solution that replaced their previous toolset; in addition, to providing additional capabilities with immediate added business value. Tempo Timesheets allowed CBG to replace their in-house time management system with an intuitive Jira-integrated solution. Tempo Budgets enabled CBG to replace several costly off-the-shelf desktop tools, and significantly simplified tracking and reporting. Furthermore, Tempo Planner has added a centralized, structured resource and project management tool, which empowered both team leads and team members to communicate and coordinate on operational and strategic team efforts. Utilizing the Tempo product suite, CBG was able to achieve ~50% cost savings in terms of expenses (licenses, hardware, software), as well as development and support hours.
Additionally, CBG has noticed increased engagement with project teams and team leads, and a greater appreciation of teamwork and team planning. The company saw about a 10% increase in teams’ productivity due to better time-reporting (Tempo Timesheets), cross-functional team adoption (Tempo Teams) and streamlined budget tracking (Tempo Budgets), as compared with our previous solution.
Almost a year later, CBG continues to advance and mature the use of Tempo, implementing Accounts as an added-value business data layer, as well as deploying Tempo Timesheets to other internal departments. Furthermore, CBG management benefits with increased awareness from real-time, data-driven KPI dashboard macros in Jira and Confluence. By leveraging Tempo’s powerful toolset of Jira project management tools, CBG can focus on core business and customers.
About the authors:
Jason Seva is the Team Lead for the IT Project Management team. In his role, he manages other IT Project Managers who work on a variety of IT projects for both internal and external customers, and also manages IT projects himself.
Paweł Krasuski is the System Manager for the CBG's JIRA implementation. In his role, he manages the JIRA and Confluence implementation at CBG, as well as the associated plug-ins (Tempo).
About CBG:
CBG is a Swedish company, established in 1965, which specializes in multilingual translation solutions such as: technical translation, desktop publishing, application development and project/system management. Headquartered in Stockholm, with nine additional offices strategically located around the world, CBG has over 200 employees who coordinate with global teams and suppliers.
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