Demand Management

Our client being one of the leading international Telecommunications service providers had a challenge of huge number of demands from business units to the software unit for new releases, bug fixes and updates with constraint resources. Their existing systems were missing complete visibility to understand productivity loss and measure ideal response times. They are already using Jira to create Sprints, Stories and Demand Management issues on a management level. Scrum teams consisting of people with different skillsets such as non-technical roles who found the existing systems not simple. It required more enhancement towards user friendliness and visually appealing reports to be used effectively. Our tool QPunch Smart Project Management was introduced and was integrated with Jira to simplify the processes and get the resource planning optimized for an easier interface.

Requirements:

• Integration with multiple communication platforms across multiple teams.
• Activity Team Boards and dashboard building.
• On Premise implementation.
• Process mapping: Demand Management core processes and workflows
• Resources time planning and control
• Issue and Risk management

Solution:

The client wanted to explore more efficient ways of working to achieve better results. They are having a large business unit with numerous teams who are technical and non-technical, dependencies, and complex workflows. Management wanted all of them to work together on one platform, so they could track milestones and see a collective view of their work while keeping the sensitive information and access between management.

As Jira was used only at the demand initiation level to create the feasibility, other employees preferred to use emails, scattered documents, and other tools of their choice. This made it difficult to keep information organized and easily accessible. We solved these problems by unifying everyone on a central, integrated platform where teams could communicate with each other, document information and manage projects. QPunch helps them to improve communications, collaboration, efficiency, and decision making. It was super easy to switch to our tool and migrate their legacy data, documents and spread sheets. Our tool and expertise helped them to plan new demands and deliver on them within time and budget. Management got the visibility through reporting of each demand forecast and when the resources will be free to take more demands based on business priorities.

Adopting QPunch practices leads to better collaboration, speed, stability, and other significant benefits. But it also created new challenges such as more meetings, manual updates, and context switching. To minimize the cons and maximize the pros we integrated our tool with Jira and pulled the data from there to our tool and breakdown into minor tasks, also integrated with Microsoft Teams, so that employees get notified when the tasks get created, updated, commented on, deleted and more without actually going inside the QPunch all the time. We provide with real time reporting of all action in the system and powerful security and privacy to ensure the data is secure using their Enterprise Active Directory single sign on (SSO).

Solution Customization to fit the requirements:

Sudden turn arounds in strategies, project scope swings, variation in constraints and shifting project demands based on other business priorities are the main challenges in any telecom provider’s enterprises. Complexity and mutual interdependencies among systems together with budget compression, cause several rework cycles in order to finalize project scope and requirements. Team management is time consuming and efficient communication between distributed stakeholders is required. So, our team closely worked with them and took suggestions from the management and customized our application in such a way we provide all the information on their fingertips and they can easily understand the status of the team members and he project immediately.

QPunch allows to better distribute everyone’s workload and by using features such as Gantt view as well as outlook type calendar view, it helped to have an overview of the entire roadmap and task dependencies . Each project has a dashboard that summarizes all the information regarding the project into a comprehensive, easily understandable form that provides all in one service for people who interested in understanding the overall status of the demand. It contains summary level information for all type of artifacts (tickets, demand initiation details, Categories, labels etc.) that can use to drill down into the appropriate section of the application. It helps them to visualize the data in donut, pie  and line chart formats, as well as display the underlying data and export to Microsoft excel for further analysis.

We introduced dynamic report in subscription level as well as in project level that contain user defined data queries which gives the ultimate in flexibility in designing reports that meets the needs of the organization.

We created Demand view / Compass view to fetch and view epics/issues from Jira. When we click on the Demand view icon, it navigates us to the page where we can search the issue number.

The above image is the screenshot of one of the demands and the information such as demand name, status, Software release, VAT release date etc.  are the other details fetched from Jira and displayed in QPunch. Below that we can see different projects and selected developers involved in this demand.

If we click on the “update plan” we can see the calendar view of those developers listed under the demand number. It displays a quick view of resource capacity and we can assign new tasks based on that. Similarly, if we click on the “Show in Gantt” we can see the Gantt view of that particular demand. We get a clear picture of number of demands involved, including the critical tasks and use milestones to visualize deadlines or baselines to compare proposed schedules to actual progress. This helped the management to do cross project planning, tracking and more.

Conclusion:

With the customization of QPunch, management was able to use them to drive their strategic decisions and monitor business growth with real time data. It helped them to identify any trends and irregularities that may need further investigation. We took care of their process, allowing them to make decisions better. We continue providing more customization based on their requirements in every consultation for a better output.