HP Indigo develops, manufactures, and markets printing solutions. It is also one of the biggest and most innovative exporter companies in Israel.

We had the pleasure of meeting Gal Fatal at the Atlassian Summit in Las Vegas. Gal, HP Indigo’s DevOps Manager, was one of the speakers. In his comprehensive presentation, Gal offered practical guidance on how to effectively pick useful apps at the Atlassian marketplace. Gal chose to describe the process HP Indigo actually went through when they tried to identify the best tool for quarterly planning. To our delight, Gal revealed that HP’s tool of choice proved to be no other than… SoftwarePlant’s BigPicture.

Company: HP Indigo

Industries: Innovative Printing Solutions

Location: Israel

Product: BigPicture

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Driven by Innovation

HP Indigo is a part of the global HP Inc.’s Graphics Solutions Business corporation. Based in Israel, the company develops, manufactures, and markets printing solutions. HP Indigo can boast an impressive employee count of 3000 people as well as outstanding market experience, gained in the course of over four decades of operation (founded in 1977 in Israel, acquired by Hewlett-Packard in 2001). HP Indigo is fascinated and driven by the technological challenges of the modern day. Consequently, they’ve become experts at effectively leveraging the digital revolution to their advantage by meeting technological challenges and changes in the print market with innovation and inventive thinking. No wonder Gal Fatal admits that, for him, it is a source of pride and professional satisfaction that he’s pursuing a career in one of the biggest and most innovative exporter companies in Israel. 

Tooling for Research&Development

In his daily work, Gal manages two teams of build management and Atlassian tools implementation at the company R&D department. They help build a product from scratch. Hence, their scope of activities includes design, manufacturing, and software development. They work using the scrum methodology. Their agile schedule is based on 2-week sprints. They do their planning on a quarterly basis. The R&D is supported by tools such as the Atlassian Jira, Confluence, and Service Desk. It was two and a half years ago that HP Indigo augmented their toolset with the addition of BigPicture.

BigPicture Aids Long-term Planning

‘We were looking for a solution to assist us with quarterly planning,’ says Gal, “We solicited the assistance of Methoda. They are an Atlassian Partner in Israel. In short, Methoda reviewed the available marketplace options for us. They checked which of them included a ‘big picture’ or ‘portfolio’ view. It was clear very quickly that only SoftwarePlant’s BigPicture offered exactly the functionality we needed — the board view. The Board proved a very effective support tool for long term planning.”

Gal Fatal: ‘In short, BigPicture gave us the perfect solution to support our quarterly planning cycle.’ 

In practical terms, having BigPicture means that HP Indigo can create all tasks for the whole quarter, assign them to all developers, and put them on a single available-to-all board. In addition, they can smoothly handle teams’ capacity to complete the planning. What’s more, BigPicture will safeguard against over- and under-allocation. “To sum up, when facilitated with the right tool, you can complete the planning in just a few hours are needed. Similarly, it will take  a mere glance — to daily check the quarterly status.”

What the future holds

Gal goes on to say that, although they are currently only used at the Development Lab, having witnessed the benefits, HP Indigo intends to implement Jira in all their R&D labs next year. It is his firm belief that as a consequence, BigPicture will find its additional role in supporting other teams in doing their planning cycles. 

Gal Fatal is a DevOps Manager at HP Indigo. He also holds the role of the Atlassian Community leader and manages Israel’s Atlassian community consisting of 600 members. In this capacity, Gal is responsible for organizing bimonthly Atlassian community events, where he speaks about Atlassian tools and apps.

See Gal Fatal’s Atlassian Summit Presentation!