Case study of Epic Roadmap. How different teams use it
We interviewed some of our customers to talk about how and why they are using our plugin, Epic Roadmap.
Speik was formed in 2019 through a merger between Aeriandi Ltd and Voxygen Ltd. The two companies had worked closely together for five years to deliver products into major UK Telcos. The combined entity offers a complete set of complementary products with global reach.
Speik’s comprehensive voice security solutions deliver complete protection from the start to the end of every call. Whether PCI DSS, MiFID II, Dodd Frank, FCA or other, compliance can be complicated and expensive to attain and maintain, which is where we can help. Their award-winning secure voice solutions are being used by large corporates with highly complex infrastructures. From call recording, archiving and PCI phone payments, to fraud detection and speech analytics, they’ve got you covered. Their 100% Software-as-a-Service solution delivers industry leading functionality and security, without the need to ever install anything on site.
The company has about 35 people and most of them are technical colleagues. They are working on several different products at the same time, with the same underlying core technologies.
Speik uses Jira, Confluence and Opsgenie to manage their development and operations. They are working with on-premises Jira and Confluence.
Challenge: Needed a solution to align multiple project timelines in an easily understandable and presentable way to see the company’s roadmap.
The software and project teams experimented with a number of tools. First, they tried the most well-known apps in Jira but they were really heavyweight and complicated to set up and would have required the team to change their way of planning and working. What the organization really needed, was a lightweight, easily understandable tool to visualize their roadmap.
Project managers had started drawing timelines in spreadsheets or in confluence pages, -but the problem was with them that they couldn’t track Jira epics and synchronizing them was always time-consuming. External tools were also investigated, but either suffered from the same manual synchronization or required a rigid integration with Jira that didn’t fit with the current processes operated by the development teams.
Finally, they heard the news that Atlassian implemented just what they asked for. The only problem was, however, that it was available only for Jira Cloud. Luckily, they found Epic Roadmap which provides the same features, and more, for Server & Data Center instances.
Epic Roadmap for Jira Software
The next-gen like roadmap solution for Jira Software Server. With the help of Epic Roadmap, you can build your high-level overview of your project’s goals easily. Create, manage and visualize your project’s Epics and keep your teammates on the same page.
Solution
Speik were able to set up Epic Roadmap quickly and start using it to lay out existing epics and plan future ones. Some small changes were needed in the arrangement of Jira epics because at the time the app didn’t support cross-project roadmaps. Since then, the newer version of Epic Roadmap can be connected to boards as well so this work would not needed anymore. Besides that, they had to add a custom date picker for the epic start and used the existing issue due date field for the target end date. That’s it – after that, they were ready to adopt the tool across the teams.
The teams work on a lot of epics simultaneously – each epic is a stream of work and each has an owner. They work on a 2-week sprint cycle and add sprint markers to see the different sprints in the roadmap and align target dates to sprints. Speik has recently started using dependency lines in Epic Roadmap between related epics to show smaller epics for particular pieces of work that are related to a longer epic with a hard deadline.
Quote
Epic Roadmap provides an intuitive, lightweight way for the project and dev teams to build and manage high-level roadmaps using real epics linked to tickets that the developers are actually working on. This has proved really valuable for all the stakeholders – projects, development, service management and sales – to share the same view of targets, progress and conflicts, without needing wholesale reworking of internal planning and processes.
“- Ashley Sutcliffe, Speik“
Computer Projects of Illinois, Inc. (CPI), is a privately held corporation known for bringing cutting-edge software solutions to the law enforcement industry. We understand the specific needs and challenges criminal justice professionals face better than other technology companies. We push the limits of technology, developing new ways for criminal justice institutions to stay connected, informed, and protected.
The company has about 74 employees. They are using on-premise Jira to manage their projects and Bitbucket for storing their repositories to comply with Criminal Justice Information Security policies.
Challenge: Needed a solution to visualize roadmaps in executive and engineering presentations
CPI is growing and requires a focused coordination to uniquely serve its forty-five US (domestic) institutions (state and federal). The company needs a tool that can help in planning, clarify roadmaps, and improve the timing of collaborative tasks among departments.
Solution
CPI found Epic Roadmap as they saw the Atlassian news about the Cloud Roadmap feature. After testing it, they knew they wanted this feature on their Jira Server instance as well. They looked up the Marketplace and found our application. CPI has the expanded capability to plan, clarify roadmaps, and visualize dependencies among departments. In a short amount of time adopting the tool, Epic Roadmap is helping to break down communication barriers and maintain unique focus across its customer base.
Quote
Epic Roadmap for our on-prem JIRA allows clear, concise planning and project oversight. It has quickly become a part of CPI’s toolset to improve communications and align efforts, diligently delivering customer-correct solutions.
“- Noah Alcantara, Message Switch Director“
Microsec Ltd. has been an active player on the Hungarian IT market since its founding in 1984. As a qualified trust service provider, they provide high quality services such as issuing qualified signature, seal and webserver certificates, qualified time stamping and qualified archiving services. The company provides a large scale of solutions based on PKI (public key infrastructure), which provide authentic, quick and secure e-administration services for organizations and private individuals.
As a result of the audit performed by the German TÜVIT, Microsec was the first in Hungary to become qualified trust service provider in accordance with the eIDAS regulation.
The company is developing and operating the information system of the Hungarian Registry Court, the Online Company Information Service and the electronic company registration process.
Since 2007 Microsec has been a full member of the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), an institute recognized by the European Union. ETSI’s task is to provide worldwide applicable standards for IT technologies which can be the basis for future economic processes.
The company has about 100 employees. They previously used another tool supporting agile software development, but later they changed to Jira as the developers required a more flexible and more configurable tool. At the moment, they are using on-premise Jira version 8 with about 10 apps.
Challenge: Microsec wanted to plan their project’s roadmap based on epics.
During the migration to Jira, it was an important requirement, that the features that have been used so far should be available in Jira as well. One of these features was to plan a roadmap with epics.
Solution
They have been advised to try Epic Roadmap for that.
The software development teams have about 15-20 projects. It would be hard to manage that much roadmap and it wouldn’t provide much information for the managers. To fix this, they created one project called ‘Product Owner Project’ where they imported the epics from these projects. This way, they can see and plan all the epics in one place. Microsec is planning half-yearly their roadmap. Dependency lines are not necessary between the epics as they are not depending on each other. The end of an epic also a milestone for the team so they use only one marker to represent the end of a half-year.
