Financial software provider proves that Custom Charts is for business teams as well as devs

It isn’t just development teams who use Custom Charts for Jira. Financial software provider intelliflo is proving that business teams can use our custom reporting tool just as capably, and get just as much value out of it.

Supporting over 30,000 financial advisers and three million end-investors worldwide, intelliflo widens access to financial advice through a powerful suite of solutions, which they manage using Jira. Their software spans the entire advisory lifecycle, from business management to cashflow planning to portfolio allocation and reporting.

intelliflo’s dev teams were the first at the company to use Custom Charts for Jira for their reporting. Each of these teams has their own Jira dashboard and they use Custom Charts for showcasing ticket volumes and version releases in detail, so that if any of the dev managers come by, they’ll have an immediate sense of what’s going on.

But the love for Custom Charts at intelliflo has been spreading way beyond the dev team…

Customs Charts now fully operational within the operations divison

intelliflo’s dev teams are agile teams who work in Scrum. But the operations division is made up of teams that are, according to Dan Tombs, intelliflo’s Atlassian administrator and agile Lead, “transitioning to agile, and currently use a mix of Scrum and other methodologies”.

And yet, he says that all the ops teams are using Custom Charts.

This means, of course, that they’re all using Jira. Even though, historically, Atlassian have struggled to persuade the world that Jira is no longer just for software development (not helped by things like Jira Core and team-managed projects), their mission’s been a resounding success over at intelliflo.

Tombs added: “The ops teams have various different pie charts on their dashboards, but the 2D charts and ability to use Jira Query Language (JQL) in Custom Charts are particularly helpful. The ops teams create them to see how many initiatives there are across the division, and how many epics are in flight within those initiatives.”

When intelliflo acquired several different companies in March 2021, the ops division created a huge internal initiative to evaluate all the different apps and directories they were using and see if they could consolidate. They used Custom Charts to showcase the work, using tile and 2D charts to visualize their progress on the epics making up the initiative, and the tasks making up those epics.

Tombs said: “With Custom Charts we were able to tell how far off the mark we were in our consolidation effort. The whole process was so much more transparent, just because of how clear and easy to understand the charts are.”

Something really interesting that intelliflo have started doing is dedicating 20% of each sprint to ‘improvement time”’ They create improvement tickets, assign story points to them, and score the data on Custom Charts. These improvements often involve cross-skilling between the different ops teams, and Custom Charts helps them visualize and better understand the resource allocation for their improvement endeavors.

How Custom Charts usage spread across the company

Tombs explains that the spread of Custom Charts for Jira across intelliflo has happened totally organically. He started using it straight away. Then the defect manager came to him and asked for a demo. Then the risk team did the same. Now the dev teams, ops teams, business intelligence (BI) team, and most recently, the service desk team, are all using it.

However, Tombs stresses that intelliflo haven’t forced Custom Charts on anyone. Rather, people have seen it and been drawn to it, and are using it because they want to. The growth has been very natural.

The BI team use Custom Charts' tile charts to look at how many tickets are being raised on particular components of intelliflo’s software, and how often they’re being resolved. The team use the Custom Charts/Scriptrunner integration to build more complex JQL searches and show, for example, whether issues were resolved within the due date, how many days after the due date, etc.

Meanwhile, the internal IT service desk team, who use Jira Service Management, are using Jira dashboards to track service level agreement (SLA) compliance and created versus resolved issues. And they, too, have been using Custom Charts' tile charts because they offer a better visual display of ticket numbers than anything you get natively.

Reporting in Jira is back

Before Custom Charts, intelliflo were doing most of their reporting externally. Some of the less technical teams would try and make do with the native reports, but they are so limited as to make it a pointless endeavor. The more accomplished users were having to export data out of Jira and use non-Atlassian platforms in order to make reports that were actually useful.

Tombs concluded: “People use to come and say, I’d like my report to show this. And we’d have to respond, sorry, you can’t. You need Tableau or PowerBI. That’s what’s so great about Custom Charts. It has everything they would need – a great variety of chart types, the ability to group and slice the data, customization, and if you’re comfortable enough writing JQL, then that’s a really powerful feature.

“Custom Charts has moved a lot of our reporting back into Jira, which is where we want everyone working. And if they’re not in Jira, they’re in Confluence, then they use the Confluence version of the app to pull Custom Charts directly onto a Confluence page. It’s so much easier for information to flow around the company.”