How to scale agile marketing with Tempo’s toolkit

About Devinity

Deviniti is an IT company founded in Poland in 2004 and known as one of the top Atlassian partners in Central Europe. Serving over 15,000 customers, Deviniti improves business processes, streamlines workflows, and create user-friendly solutions.

The problem

In three years, Deviniti’s marketing department doubled in size. With that growth came new challenges as the old ways of working were no longer fit for purpose as the workflows became more complex. They knew they needed new ways of working to meet this new structure.

Dzmitry Hryb, strategic marketing manager at Deviniti during this time, oversaw this change. Hryb and his team initially moved from a request-based system for incoming work to a hybrid approach of agile and waterfall planning.

However, project documentation was scattered across multiple tools like Confluence and Google Sheets, plans had to be updated manually in spreadsheets every month, and there was a growing demand to evolve their workflows.

Hryb said: “We needed a more refined workflow and issue structure, as well as a couple of new features that would make our lives a lot easier and more transparent.”

They needed more than just a change of mindset – they needed a toolkit that could match the scale of their new operation. Thanks to a discussion with Atlassian’s service team, they found exactly the tools for the job: Structure PPM and Timesheets from Tempo.

One Structure to rule them all

 Hryb said that before upgrading, their epics tended to get a little out of hand and end up as a senseless stack of hundreds of tasks – something they solved with a four-level issue-type structure:

1. Projects and Standing Orders

2. Stages

3. Epics

4. Tasks and Stories

To visualize and manipulate these structures, Hryb and the team used Structure PPM.

Structure enabled Hryb and his team to visualize all of their Jira projects across Devinti’s entire portfolio and roll them up into customizable spreadsheet-like views.

Using Structure’s Gantt Charts add-on, Hryb created charts with columns to show the status and project cost in real-time across all teams – enabling far greater collaboration and communication than before.

Their Structure is based on custom Jira issue links – with Deviniti's own unique twists added to the view from their Confluence pages.

"Displaying linked Confluence pages on the same screen is one of the coolest features I've ever used!" said Hryb, "Now we have our drafts and ready deliverables under each Epic, so the review process is seamless. We can also edit these materials right away, and it respects the space permissions set up in Confluence."

Improved workflows

Now, their workflows are much clearer. There is a separate status for new tasks created in advance that haven't been planned yet and the team and Devinti have been able to explore all the new options they have for tracking and understanding their issues in Jira.

First, they added more custom fields for grouping tasks and reporting.

• Beneficiary and cost type (select lists) help break down the cost of labor and properly track billable utilization, which is one of their KPIs.

• Stakeholders and Consultants (User pickers) are used for notifying relevant people about the latest changes and informing the assignee about who they can contact regarding the particular task.

“The on hold status is a game changer,” said Hryb, “because so many dependencies mean they often have to wait for something or someone.

If you are only working with tools like Confluence or Google Sheets, you are seeing a small part of your workflows at once. It can take a lot of effort and workshopping to get all of your documents in a single place to all ongoing work, and getting eyes on the status of each project requires either manually checking or asking people.

While that can work when the team is just a few people, larger teams need more and that is where Structure helps.

For example, to create more optimal workloads, Hryb and the team check the sum of estimated time per assignee and daily distribution on the resource usage view. At the end of the sprint, they verify estimates versus the actual time spent and talk through the differences during the retro.

Sprint planning

Structure also allowed Hryb’s team to group all of their epics per sprint, a feature he found particularly useful.

“We release a typical Epic within 1-2 sprints, so we plan it as a whole or split it in half. We don't plan the Stories, though, as they never close. Instead, 20% of our time is always allocated to them as a buffer.

“With Structure PPM, we can group Epics per sprint. This means no more Confluence tables and Google Sheets for planning!”.

The Deviniti team also makes project and sprint views public so stakeholders can look at work in progress at any time.

Hryb said: "We've set up a custom time and cost dashboard in Tableau, which aggregates data from Timesheets each month automatically. We don't have to even think about reporting it! Our CMO loves not having to merge multiple Excel spreadsheets anymore."

The results

How has the Deviniti marketing team benefitted? Project managers and coordinators highlight their increased flexibility, project transparency, and ease of use at scale.

For Deviniti’s CMO, some of the best things about the new setup include the ability to zoom in and out on the project portfolio, and automatic reporting that makes it simple to govern project status audit costs without asking teams for reports.

Hryb added: "We saw 20% billable utilization growth and shortened delivery times by 59% on average almost instantly.

"During this project, we learned that Jira Software can be a surprisingly good fit for non-technical teams. It's most beneficial when the team is scaling up, the processes are complex, and those who we collaborate with also work in the same environment.”

Note: This customer story is, with permission, based on a writeup in the Atlassian Community.