TTTech harnesses Structure and Tempo for powerful insights

The TTTech Group is a leading provider of safe networked computing platforms that make megatrends like the internet of things and autonomous mobility a reality.

With major clients like NASA, Boeing, and BMW along with 2,300 employees and 14 locations worldwide, TTTech is a true major enterprise organization with a global impact.

Having thousands of employees and household names as clients comes with major expectations and massive projects spanning teams and continents. A few years ago, TTTech Group was looking for a better way to track and visualize what was happening across projects, and they needed a new solution to help achieve that goal. 

“When I came to TTTech three years ago, I got the mandate to find a project management solution and I had freedom in deciding if we should just build it in our existing Jira stack or go for a different tool,” said René Hans, project management expert. 

“We decided to build everything around our Jira stack because it made sense. Firstly, our decision was to use Structure for Jira and the Structure product family, and a bit later Tempo Timesheets, because Jira effort tracking is not sufficient for our purposes.”

Read on to discover how TTTech combines Structure and Tempo Timesheets to manage major international projects in a hybrid software development environment.

How TTTech uses waterfall and agile

While some sectors of the TTTech Group are pure Agile, some use a waterfall approach to developing software. Those stakeholders have to create a scope, plan everything in advance, and not think in story points or complexity points.

Hans noted that many companies and groups have adopted a hybrid approach where Agile and Waterfall methods must coexist within larger organization. That's a challenge that TTTech faces as well.

How TTTech uses Structure to model milestones

Structure for Jira helps Atlassian's largest customers visualize, track, and manage progress across Jira projects and teams. It does this with adaptable, user-defined, issue hierarchies presented in a familiar spreadsheet-like view of Jira issues.

“Structure helps us to give context in terms of aggregating everything and seeing all the phases or objects or even features and their interrelation to other project activities,” Hans said. “Because in Jira you have nice boards, but you do not see the interrelation and how everything comes together.”

This method represents a big change from how TTTech was using Jira before. 

“We used Jira as a line by line, issue by issue list, and the list would not give us a context, overview and understanding of the structure of your project itself,” Hans said. 

The team at TTTech particularly appreciates the digital approval process integrated into Jira, which was previously executed by sending emails. Structure offers a centralized system for supporting that work so that project managers have a high-level understanding of what's happening in a project, all in one place. 

How TTTech uses Timesheets with Structure to track the progress of projects

At TTTech, budget overrun is measured in hours logged, and that’s part of why they use Tempo Timesheets, the #1 time tracking tool for Jira. Before, they had a self-made time and effort tracking system, which had become dated.

“It was increasingly inconvenient to track project efforts in that kind of system,” Hans said.

Timesheets offers a potent combination with Structure as it tracks project efforts and Structure aggregates the information for layers that are relevant for project managers.

More importantly, the two apps together create a system for flagging projects that have gone over budget – one that works in real-time. The result? A helpful representation of the status of projects and the ability to foresee problems at different levels.

“This is actually one of the biggest values we can provide for our project managers,” Hans said. “They see immediately if parts of their work breakdown are developing problems. You see it in context. You're not just looking at issues, it aggregates up to an initiative or feature level and up to your whole project level.” 

Positive feedback on Structure and Timesheets

The combination of Tempo and Structure has been praised at TTTech for its ease of use.

“We have a good combo of Structure and Tempo,” said Hans, “and we had really positive feedback. It's quite easy for people to use.”

The benefits of the combination are clear to Hans.

“We can compare in real-time what has been planned and what's happening in reality, and we can show it in all contexts and in all the hierarchies within Structure,” Hans said. “Timesheets and Structure really are a perfect match.