Sii Poland is one of the leading IT and engineering services vendors in the CEE region. With over five thousand people on board, working in diverse methodologies and technologies, applying a vast stack of tools, the company is unquestionably a challenging environment for any management software solution.
The BigPicture pilot implementation at Sii’s Internal IT is almost complete. Agata Czygrinow, Senior Project Manager in charge of this pilot and the Pilot Team members, agreed to share how Internal IT has so far benefited from using SoftwarePlant’s flagship app and to present further implementation plans.
– “In the face of the Sii Internal IT rapid growth, we started the BigPicture pilot implementation in May 2020, leveraging our vast experience from commercial implementations. The purpose of the undertaking was to address requirements defined by different management roles at various levels. The first task in the pilot was to check the quality of the data on which BigPicture was supposed to operate” – explains Agata Czygrinow.
Data first
The QA team led by Marta Grzeszczyk started with making sure that all the relevant technical and management information is stored in the Internal IT Jira instance so that BigPicture could be fueled with quality data right from day one. Besides, a series of workshops for Internal IT Teams was launched.
Agility and predictability
– “Every application developed by Sii has a dedicated team, a Product Owner, and a Team Manager. Sii Internal IT applied agile methodologies in Jira. Hence, Sii’s Internal IT BigPicture instance has been configured with Jira acting as the single source of truth about development activities. At any time, each of the roles can easily access all the information crucial from their unique perspective.” – emphasizes Agata Czygrinow.
BigPicture modules in use
In the nearly completed pilot, Sii Internal IT managers leverage most of the modules provided by BigPicture, including Scope, Gantt, Resources and Board. The Scope module supports managers in taking into account all the complex interdependencies between various implementation teams.
– “We can now visualize those dependencies any time and make sure the scope of work corresponds with the business requirements.” – explains Cezary Kamiński, IT Project Manager. The Gantt module is used mostly by Internal IT Project Managers at Sii, regardless of the framework they use. The tool is flexible enough to be used for traditional waterfall planning as well as for agile roadmapping.
– “In turn, the Resources module is utilized by Team Managers for analyzing the availability of resources (teams and skills), assigning and scheduling tasks, and automated capacity updating, which effectively prevents under and overallocation. BigPicture enables collecting information about absences. Managers know in advance when to expect limited availability of some specific resources so they can take it into account in project planning.” – clarifies Kinga Próchniak, ERP AX Domain Leader. The Board module supports Project Managers, Product Owners and Team Leaders in planning the next steps for backlog realization and pointing out specific backlog tasks to be implemented within each project’s scope. The most useful feature is that Board shows data manually added to the planning scope so that any change in data made by other users is easy to identify.
Immediate benefits
The ongoing BigPicture pilot has already brought Sii Internal IT a handful of tangible benefits. The first and most important one is the establishment of a single source of truth for all the parties involved in development and project management.
“All the crucial Internal IT management information is stored in Jira, available both directly and via BigPicture – always up to date and right at hand” – comments Kinga Próchniak. The ease of data visualization brought by BigPicture has made management way easier and intuitive.
BigPicture pilot has proven that the information flow between Internal IT Managers can be effectively streamlined and that the use of spreadsheets to plan future initiatives can be reduced significantly. BigPicture helps Sii Internal IT achieve clarity of internal planning and management processes. Those involve not only managers responsible directly for the development of applications but also the individuals in charge of quality and release cycles: QA Manager and Release Manager – roles crucial for the Internal IT operational excellence.
Marta Grzeszczyk, QA Team Manager, and Łukasz Mędrala, Release Manager, use BigPicture to monitor the overall progress of work as well as the execution of specific initiatives so that they can respond to the dynamics of processes instantly.
– “For me, BigPicture is a very useful tool to monitor the cost of release management activities” – emphasizes Łukasz Mędrala.
Plans and continuous training
The app is expected to support the everyday management activities of Team Managers, Product Owners, Project Managers, as well as Quality Manager and Release Manager. BigPicture functionalities cover capacity management (including absences management), skills management, task management, product management, project management, quality management, and release management. The series of workshops and training is in full swing and the company plans to soon use BigPicture in management at all levels.
If you want to learn more about Sii, visit sii.pl
