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Background

An IT solutions company with a global presence was looking for a platform to manage their DevOps (Development Operations).  They had both offshore and onshore development units. Their clients were spread across multiple geographies. Some clients were served from offshore units and while some were served by onshore units due to statutory requirements. The requirement was to streamline their DevOps in the best possible manner to achieve their goal of deliveries.

Goal

Delivery of timely and quality solutions to the customer using the right amount of resources

Challenges

The company had adopted agile development methodology. The development life cycle included coding, configuration management, integration testing, deployment, integration and change management. Operations included administrative processes, hardware and software support internal and external clients. In each of these areas there were multiple stakeholders involved. Managing team’s daily tasks, monitoring, reviewing and approvals at each stage involved communication at all stages. The need for continuous engagement from all concerned was paramount. None of these activities work in silos and consider their job done when items moved out of their court. Their work environment looked something like this.

Teams needed to work with each to other to accomplish their own tasks and help other teams to meet their common goal of delivering the project.

• Business Analyst team worked with specifications and testing team to capture exact user requirements and elicitation of the same.
• Development team got the well specified requirements. They got inputs from Configuration management team while coding. They worked closely with testing team to deliver an error free software.
• Operations worked with Business Analysis, Testing and other teams to ensure streamlined working environment.

It was important that everyone knew customer’s expectation from the solution; how it was being architected, developed, configured, tested, released and last but not the least how the solution was finally being used.

Equally important was tracking the progress and raising any flags that could derail the delivery timelines or compromise the quality of the final solution.

There was lot of work happening but no one knew what was happening where and when.

Solution

For a while the company tried using agile methodology. Sprints, stand-up meetings helped in smart working and quick turnaround of the requirements. The biggest draw-back found in these meeting was that these were person dependent and demanded for structured documentation. If any one of these failed, things would fall through the cracks. The late realization of these bottlenecks would prove costly to the project.

Company decided to use Sigmify, platform for Collaboration @ Work. With implementation of Sigmify the work and communication that was spread across multiple channels was defragmented. The processes in DevOps were streamlined on Sigmify.

Benefits

All participants in the development and operations process were onboarded on Sigmify. They were formed into different teams. Some users belonged to multiple teams. They got rights as per their tasks and responsibilities in the process. Sigmify helped prioritize their tasks based on the importance and urgency of the tasks on hand and boost individual productivity.

What made a marked difference in the productivity of the teams and organization was Collaboration.

• Timely and quality project delivery was ensured as every resource that worked on the project was aware of her tasks and the project status at all times.
• Due to the common platform all stakeholders had equal visibility or potential of having equal visibility when required.
• Any individual user could contribute or value-add to the process at any level even if he did not have access to a task in the normal scheme of the process.
• Any corrective action could be discussed and implemented at the point of failure itself rather than waiting for the domino effect to take place.
• Because the key stakeholders had visibility at all times, decision-making was fast and assuring.
• All the suggestions, discussions were documented and attached to the relevant transactions. They created wealth of knowledge base for the company. Sigmify’s quick and powerful search made them available when needed.

Conclusion

Sigmify helped the company bring all its communication and processes in DevOps under one umbrella. It helped in getting to know the exact status of each task, prevent delays by timely alerts, increased productivity at all levels and on-time and within budget delivery of projects.