Top 4 challenges of delivering IT transformation and change

The following article was a guest post originally published on the Zephyr blog.

Delivering IT transformation and change is hard. Working and managing on these programmes can be stressful, often because you are responsible for something which you feel that you cannot control. 

Have you experienced any of these problems?

• This is perhaps the most important challenge and one that keeps project managers awake at night.
• "What do you mean, we’ve had to drop a couple of features and we will have to ‘limit’ testing?? How are we going to explain this to the stakeholders?"

• Requirements change. Situations change. Technologies change. People change.
• "Didn't you see the email? Have you not been working from the v3.1a requirements document?"

• IT departments rely on outsourced teams alongside internal staff, to deliver complex IT projects. The projects span across the business, from marketing, to ops.
• "I thought that the offsite team was definitely delivering at close of play yesterday?! This is going to delay the go-live!"

• What works for a team of 4, will not work for a team of 40, let alone 400. The simple shared spreadsheet becomes less than simple. The number of meetings goes up exponentially, and cc’d emails overflow the inbox.
• "Another meeting?? I'll never get any actual work done!"

Visibility and control, live management reporting against plans, a single record of requirements, activity done and remaining, test management and integrated version control might, allowing teams to scale and collaborate might sound like a pipe dream. But the Atlassian products with Zephyr can make this a reality.

• Confluence: the single place to record and collaborate requirements and design
• JIRA Software: work management for technology delivery teams. Collaborate at scale: plan, track and report in one easy to use, customisable tool.
• Zephyr for JIRA: Real-time test management reporting fully integrated with JIRA. Plan and execute test cycles, link requirements to tests, and show testing progress on dashboards.
• Bitbucket: enterprise level, collaborative, version control. Fine grained permissions, enterprise scalability and management controls plus integration with JIRA Software makes release management clear and transparent.
• JIRA for Service desk: transition from programme delivery to operational excellence. Integration back to JIRA and delivery management
• Portfolio for JIRA: track, manage and allocate delivery of multiple projects and programmes across the organisation

At first glance, this seems to a large number of disparate pieces of software and it might seem that bringing them all together is a challenge in of itself. Fortunately, both Atlassian and Zephyr have got the balance right between features and ease of use at just that sweet spot that make the day-to-day things easy and the more difficult things possible.

To show you how the development process maps on to the full product stack, we can arrange a short, practical end-to-end webinar demonstration. We will show you live management reports, and the flow from requirements to test and build. Contact us.