Company: Nielsen Business Media, Online.
Summary:
Recognizing the value that a centralized system of tracking projects
and communication between functional groups would add to the product
development and building process, I pitched the idea of integrating the JIRA system
across QA, project management and develop teams. The system also gave management the tools to track
employee hours per project. Access to
this data gave management the opportunity to perform a per project cost analysis.
After receiving approval from the VP of Technology to move our
work groups onto the JIRA platform, I customized the system to suit the needs
of each group involved in the project process.
History:
Prior to the transition to JIRA, each of the functional
teams playing a significant role in projects used separate tracking
systems. The Project Management team
used MS Project and Excel to track projects while the QA team used Bugzilla and
Excel to track tickets and the Development team used Bugzilla for bug tracking
and Excel or hand written notes to track tasks.
Project hours were tracked via a Lotus Notes application
customized for our online support desk. It
was used sparingly by the various work groups to track time spent on projects;
however, was missing several key project cost analysis features since the
system was intended for tracking support desk tickets.
After experimenting with several project management tools, I
found JIRA from Atlassian Software. Over
the course of 18 months, I demoed the product to each of the department
managers whose groups would benefit from the features offered by JIRA. After receiving their support, I pitched the
product to the VP of Technology who gave the green light to purchase the
license to JIRA.
JIRA succeeded in consolidating project and task tracking
for the Project Management, QA and Development groups facilitating project
status reporting as well as analysis of project costs.
Technologies:
JSP, Tomcat, Oracle, Linux
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