Why Structure PPM was the ideal app for adapting to BlueCat’s workflows

“One company’s simple rule: Always look for project management tools that are flexible enough to suit how you already work.”

Kelly Arrey, Engineering Operations Manager, BlueCat

A few years ago, BlueCat Networks’ project management process was fraying at the seams. Their tooling was a combination of spreadsheets and out-of-the-box Jira, and that had worked well back when the Toronto-based software company had only two or three teams in the mix — but now, BlueCat was growing.

Projects were growing in complexity, and a blizzard of epics were overwhelming everyone from finding their next project and what to work on. Combine that with their spreadsheet data being out of date almost as soon as it was exported and they needed a serious rethink of their workflows.

BlueCat needed to create a single system that kept everyone in sync and made work easier to parse. Clearly, the next step was to find useful apps on the marketplace that could build off their Jira setup and help create a scalable system.

But when you launch a search like that, it’s important to keep one thing in mind, says Kelly Arrey, BlueCat’s engineering operations manager.

She said: “Don’t just look for a great app; look for one that maps to your existing workflow and culture. Otherwise, you’re just adding friction to your organization.

“If your tool maps to your process in a straightforward way, your users don’t need to stick notes all over their monitors to remind them how to navigate it — at each point, the next step is clear. When it’s easy to use, people will use it.”

BlueCat landed on Structure PPM as its primary way to efficiently track and understand their efforts clearly as they scaled up. Here’s how the company, which now has a 130-person dev team, organized its work in Jira with the help of Structure.

Organize the work to match your team’s preferences

If your work isn’t organized in manageable pieces, and in a way that is somewhat intuitive for your team, you’ll constantly miss important data and your teams will struggle to coordinate.

Arrey and the team wanted to organize their hierarchies in a way that went above the standard Jira epic. Structure PPM enabled exactly that – allowing for largely open-ended construction of hierarchies, so Bluecat could organize work in a way that suited their preferences.

Here’s what they went with:

• Release

• Feature

• Goal

• Epic

• Story

BlueCat is able to visualize their preferred issue hierarchy with a few simple rules.

BlueCat could zoom in and out of its hierarchies — drilling down to see stories, and then back up for high-level feature views. Everyone could see their work in its proper context, in as much or little detail as they needed.

What does Structure PPM do?

With Structure, Arrey’s team builds hierarchies of issues, called “structures,” and populates them using the app’s automation feature. This allows users to define special rules — called generators — that become the basis for these hierarchies.

BlueCat uses an insert generator to pull in the root-level issue, and add extend generators, which follow issue links, epic links, and sub-task links to build out the tree from the roots.

For example, BlueCat uses a custom Jira issue link called “contains <-> belongs to” to create the desired hierarchy.

If someone updates the issue links, the structure updates in response. Furthermore, as new releases, features, or goals are added elsewhere in Jira that fit the JQL criteria, they get automatically pulled into the structure.

Arrey added: “It’s very powerful — our program managers live and die by this.”

De-clutter hierarchies to keep users focused on the right tasks

Individual BlueCat users can take advantage of a feature called transformations to re-organize their hierarchies — without changing the views of other users sharing the structure. This means users can see individual tasks in a variety of contexts that can help them ensure everything is accounted for.

The result? Now Arrey’s team can see the issues that matter to them without it affecting anyone else’s view.

BlueCat uses transformations to narrow the focus of their structures for a particular topic or team.

BlueCat uses a few types of transformations. Select an epic together with the pin transformation, and you zoom in on specific parts of the structure. For example, selected epics — and their parents and children — will be highlighted while everything above and below will be grayed out or disappear.

Other transformations create different views that allow users to see their work in whatever context they need.

Adapting as your workflow evolves

Arrey wanted to construct a suite of tools that mapped to BlueCat’s workflows and processes — and in part, that meant creating a system that could change as necessary.

They need tools that are flexible enough to allow for adaptations in the process. With Tempo and Structure PPM, they found a tool that had the power and flexibility to change as their businesss grew – without growing in complexity and leaving their developers behind.

“Our development process continues to evolve. At any given time, we may update it to suit our needs. Depending on where we see problems, we might add a step here or there — a code review step, or a code deployment phase after we started doing software as a service.”

Getting to the next level

The process and tools BlueCat had used as a younger, smaller company had to change. It was awkward to sync up spreadsheets and Jira, and made the work difficult to track.

But instead of looking for a revolution that forced bigger workflow upheaval on the company, Arrey looked for ways to support BlueCat’s process — as it existed in that moment, as well as the ways in which it was likely to evolve.

Using Structure PPM, they laid out the views that they wanted, automated actions to track tasks, and gave themselves space to change their process as needed.

If you want to see what Structure could do you for teams, you can reach out out to us for a demo or get a full free trial over on the Atlassian Marketplace

Tempo is dedicated to providing the right solution at the right cost to your teams – meeting them where they are instead of forcing them to relearn all of their workflows.

If you want to know more about Structure, or see our other solutions for time tracking, resource management, roadmapping, and more – you can find us at https://www.tempo.io/.