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“As such a big organization, there isn’t one approach that works for everybody. We needed [a solution] that could adapt to our organization. Apptio did a good job of collaborating with us, advising us, and helping us understand whether their solution would fit our needs.”
As the main software provider for a large automotive manufacturer, this software company’s development team receives a high volume of requests for new functionalities. Each request becomes an artifact in Jira and is later turned into a portfolio epic. From there, the request is distributed across the organization to be developed into new capabilities and features.
With many projects and project teams, however, it was a challenge for the project and portfolio leaders to track the status of the work being done and report back to the manufacturer.
“We had real issues tracking requests,” said one solution engineer and product owner. “If we accepted a request, and six months later, the manufacturer wanted to know what was happening with it, we weren’t able to answer this properly because we didn’t have traceability or transparency for new requests.”
The company’s leadership team realized they needed an Enterprise Agile Planning (EAP) solution to resolve this challenge. They evaluated several EAP products but ultimately selected IBM Targetprocess over the others because of the solution’s versatility, adaptability, and ease of use.
“A lot of the other products had a fixed setup of the way the system works,” the customer said. “If we asked to do release management, for example, or to add custom entities, the vendor couldn’t do it. But Targetprocess was adaptable for our use cases. When we asked Apptio, an IBM company, to make a change to accommodate a specific need, they were able to do it. That was a big advantage, and it really added a lot of value to us.”
The product and portfolio management lead at the company added, “As such a big organization, there isn’t one approach that works for everybody. We needed [a solution] that could adapt to our organization. Apptio did a good job of collaborating with us, advising us, and helping us understand whether their solution would fit our needs.”
By implementing Targetprocess, the company now has an EAP platform that enables them to manage work, track new requests, and report project status more efficiently and effectively than they could before.
This capability is best illustrated by a recent large transformation project. The project was being managed using Jira and Confluence as a big team-of-teams organization, and the leadership team was struggling to manage it.
“The project leaders approached us and asked if they could manage it in Targetprocess instead,” said the product and portfolio leader. “In four weeks, we did the whole configuration and onboarded over 400 people. Now, the whole transformation project is being managed in Targetprocess, and people are very happy. In fact, the leaders and managers have experienced so much added value that they are telling others in the company about how great a tool Targetprocess is. As a result, we are currently experiencing a big pull [demand] in the organization.”
The company has been using Targetprocess for about six months. While the company has seen tremendous improvement in Agile delivery, the next step is to increase the adoption of the solution by more and more teams to achieve the full scope of transparency for all different parts of the organization.
“This will help us connect the planning data and what people are doing with the money we are spending and the achievements we are making,” the customer said. “We are very confident we will realize this core business case.”
When asked to share advice for others who are considering Targetprocess, the customer said “Just start. Try things out. It is very easy to implement. Try to showcase stuff instead of planning it for a year.”
The product and portfolio leader added, “My recommendation is to approach the Apptio team. They are really friendly and open-minded. Test the tool. Get a login, create views. Experience what the tool is capable of, and you will see the difference quite early.”
Sign up for a personalized demo of IBM Targetprocess and see how your organization can accelerate its Agile transformation.
