Interestingly enough, the initial need expressed to Valiantys was purely tactical — we met at a trade show, and the initial question was, “can you help us figure out if our Atlassian license expense is optimized?” This is a very common subject in large organizations, where the use of Jira and Confluence grew exponentially through many different teams, often in different countries. In this situation, license management becomes a serious headache, with multiples invoices across different departments, making it a challenge to analyze the real TCO of the Atlassian investments. At Valiantys, we are very familiar with these situations and are usually able to regroup, co-term, and streamline all your Atlassian and marketplace apps into one simple invoice per year, greatly simplifying our customers’ procurement process.
This inquiry got our attention. As we have deep technical expertise with Atlassian tools, we started a conversation about the management of their development teams. A quick audit revealed an interesting situation; lots of variation between teams (even if they were working on common projects), different tools (Jira, Rally), and significant challenges with aligning strategy and execution since bottom-up and lateral information was difficult to gather and share with the executive management.
The company quickly realized the benefits of a consistent team environment and a real tool to connect all teams. But some serious groundwork had to be done! Unifying all team environments meant replacing Rally by Jira and aligning Jira instances across the board, with 10.000 users in 5 different countries using different processes. This was a significant technical and change-management challenge. On top of all of this, the company could not stop developing their products during the migrations and consolidations, so the tool and associated process changes had to be super fast with no margin for error.
The second phase of the project was to first implement Jira Align for the most strategic and advanced Agile teams, and eventually the whole company.
The expected benefits were:
- Providing more transparency and visibility on the work being done
- Aligning all teams across the company using the Scaled Agile principles
- Implementing and tracking 5 strategic OKRs
- Ensuring customer value compared to competitors
- Accelerating the development of next-gen products
In one sentence, it meant providing visibility from Strategy to Execution.