Rohde & Schwarz migrate to Jira with ease thanks to Structure PPM

Migrations are a serious business. It is more than just a changing of the old for the new – it’s an investment in the future of your organization’s people and way of work. Rohde & Schwarz, one of the world’s leading technology groups, knew this when they made the move to Jira. 

Their migration was made smoother thanks to Structure PPM. The leading PPM tool for Jira provided the advanced functionality to enhance their workflows while maintaining the familiarity and accessibility of a tool they understood, minimizing the disruption of changing software.

With over 13,000 employees worldwide and an annual revenue of 2.78 billion euros, Rohde & Schwarz’s products and solutions are broad in scope. They work on everything from cybersecurity and technology to testing and measurement.

Rainier Klopper, Atlassian admin at Rohde & Schwarz, spoke to Tempo about their successful migration from IBM Jazz to Structure PPM. He also discussed how the team uses Structure Gantt to improve data visualization and decision making across the organization.

Why the team chose Structure PPM

So how did Structure PPM and Gantt Charts help Klopper’s team and why was it their first choice for a migration?

Klopper said, “We wanted something with a similar look and feel for our users. It had to work like what people were used to. We also had the requirement to plan our sprints and development a bit better – and with Gantt Charts for Structure we can do that. It’s all more visible.”

He added: “The transition from Jazz to Structure is easy. Without that process being made simple, our users simply wouldn’t accept the migration to Jira without this look and feel.” 

All teams, no matter the size of the organization they work for, want the tools they use to be the best they can be. No-one wants to use something they know is worse, but you also don’t want to invest in something your teams won’t use – or feel uncomfortable using – because it is too much of a jump in what they know.

Getting a new tool for a team is more than just a question of money. It’s an investment of time, employee goodwill, and productivity. 

It requires a careful selection of the right tool, an understanding of what the process entails, and a sensitive approach to your team. After all, they are the ones who could end up changing their entire workflows. 

Change management was a key consideration for Klopper when it came to selecting a tool to move away from IBM Jazz. He and his team needed a flexible tool that would cause minimal disruption to their teams but still had the advanced features they needed to thrive.

Making migrations manageable

Along with choosing a tool that would be flexible to their team's needs and not be overly disruptive, it also needed to have a serious impact. 

Klopper said, “Structure PPM has influenced all our strategic planning. Now we don’t have to use multiple tools for project planning. All our resource planning, our scheduling, and everything is now all in Jira with Structure and Gantt Charts for Structure.”

With a company as large and complex as Rohde & Schwarz, scalability was a factor too. As a Jira-native tool, Structure is built with enterprise scale in mind. Klopper expects to have rolled out Structure to over 10,000 users by the end of 2024.

Structure helped Klopper create a cleaner and more trackable Jira for everyone. It allows the team to manage issues and track progress across projects and teams with adaptable, user-defined issue hierarchies. And all of that work is presented in an intuitive spreadsheet-like view.

That means the team has actionable insights on resources and can increase operational efficiency, reduce costs, and unlock more capacity.

Before, Klopper’s team didn’t have a good enough resource planning tool and they knew the overview of how they plan their sprints wasn’t up to the task. Structure provided that functionality, but they went into greater detail with the Gantt Charts for Structure PPM add-on. 

Real-time project visualization with Gantt Charts

While planning for the post-migration world of Jira and Structure, it became clear that the Rohde & Schwarz teams would need a reporting tool that would scale as they did. 

Klopper turned to the most popular add-on for Structure to help his team with the migration: Gantt Charts for Structure PPM.

With Gantt Charts, the teams at Rohde & Schwarz can take all the data in Jira and create visualizations of project plans that update in real-time. That means a single view for all their projects and sprints and it also has automated task distribution to manage and identify gaps.

Klopper said:

“Structure PPM and the Gantt Charts add-on play a huge role in our future projects. We don't have an adequate resource planning tool without Structure and we knew the ways we were structuring our sprints and plans could be better. Gantt Charts changed all this.”

Gantt Charts for Structure works whether you are working agile or waterfall, a large company or a small team. It’ll give your team visualization options for portfolio scheduling, quarterly planning work, capacity visualization, project retros, complex waterfall infrastructure projects, and more.

Klopper found it was the perfect accompaniment to help complete their migration and start afresh with Jira and Structure. With Gantt Charts, they had a system that would deliver long-term value and new options to the team immediately – without a major learning curve. 

He concluded: “Structure and Tempo are a huge part of our projects. I’d recommend Tempo solutions to other companies because you can do great time management and you can get a better overview of all your issues and projects in Jira. Tempo opens up new possibilities.”

If you want to see more of what Structure can do, or how it could help your teams, you can get a free trial to drop right into your Jira instance. You can read all about Structure’s features and start your free trial over on Structure’s Atlassian marketplace page.