The acquisition of Whole Foods by Amazon begs the question of whether or not the Amazon Go model will appear at Whole Foods Markets. In addition to watching a traditional sales model potentially evolve, or even become obsolete, we can see that marketplace differentiation is often becoming more dependent on technology in general and on software specifically.
It’s not surprising that the frequency and pace of change is intense for any business looking to create differentiation through technology (and bring that benefit to market sooner than the other guy). A company’s sales and product delivery structure might need to be drastically shifted and stakeholders likely require new alignment behind the scenes to support rapid development.
One of the key challenges in this situation comes from the fact that there are so many teams involved in product launches in general—like engineering, product management, product marketing, corporate marketing and others.
Each operates as its own unit and probably uses different tools to manage their part of a product release. Thus, to achieve synergy, especially in a fast moving scenario, there’s an excessive investment of time and effort that manifests itself in an endless number of meetings and emails.
We see this scenario repeat itself at many prospect and customer environments, where at the eye of product development, the engineering team use JIRA, but other key stakeholders do not. As a result, visibility into agile projects or release status greatly suffers. These visibility challenges come up again and again from stakeholders outside of engineering, such as:
- Product Marketing Teams
- What’s our overall product launch status? I can see my team’s tasks and status but are we aligned with the engineering team?
- As we’re working on the launch plan and assets, are we still tracking to the in scope for the next release?
- Office of the CIO
- Which features will make it to the GA date, and are we delivering expected benefits to the business?
- Do we need to allocate additional budget for engineering team to meet our commitments? Do they need more resources?
- Project Management Office
- Are we approving the right projects that align to strategic goals?
- Do we have enough resources to take on the new projects? How can we optimize resource deployment across programs?
- What is status across the different teams to ensure successful product launch?
- How do I manage inter-project dependencies?
- Finance team
- As I need to calculate our software capitalization, how many hours did we invest in new features vs. maintenance?
- What is the total cost to deliver projects and our products? What was the cost of a specific release?
Stakeholders outside of JIRA ‘chase’ the engineering team to get an accurate view of the product development status to ensure a successful launch.
Clarizen’s JIRA Integration
To solve this problem, and to drive business agility by reducing the number of meetings and emails, Planview AdaptiveWork delivers an out of the box solution to integrate JIRA.
Using this integration the teams can achieve continuous visibility into where engineering is with their projects.
Here’s an example of a cross-team dashboard that is continuously updated via Planview AdaptiveWork’s JIRA integration. This dashboard provides real-time status on JIRA epics and user stories so everyone’s aligned and can make informed decisions on the data:
At a glance, all relevant stakeholders are on the same page and know the status of what’s coming from engineering without clogging the day with more meetings or emails.
Want to learn more?
Please visit our success site or drop us an email and we’ll be happy to chat.
Yoav Boaz
VP Product
