In technology we trust! How BigPicture aided PPM processes at teclet.

Ian Faulkner, Glanty’s Chief Technology Officer, is automating pre-tenancy, property management and lifecycle lettings processes.

Meet Glanty—the privately funded company behind teclet platform, which supports a range of letting services (from pre-tenancy through property management to lifecycle support) to agents and landlords. teclet is a technologically advanced Software-as-a-Service solution for automating the letting process and reducing the administration overhead.

A ground-breaking product, teclet’s functionally rich platform achieves two key things: firstly, it provides agents, landlords and their customers with a portal and services which automate (in a compliant and auditable way) the pre-tenancy, property management and lifecycle lettings processes. Secondly, it provides a unified portal that links the disparate systems used across the industry into a single, cohesive, user experience. And that is something to brag about!

Company: Glanty, teclet platform

Industries: Property management

Location: U.K.

Product: BigPicture

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The challenges

We meet Glanty’s CTO, Ian Faulkner—an expert in his field with over 20 years of CEO/CTO experience under his belt—to discuss the challenges of building Glanty into a successful business, especially the challenge of aligning the work of distributed teams and making sure Glanty’s technical savvy is matched with superb customer service.

This is how Ian himself describes the core pain points: “We are run from the head-office in Gravesend, but the development work is done by a small team of people scattered around the UK – from Grimsby to Bournemouth. While balancing remote working (for the IT side of the business) with a ‘head-office’ mentality for sales and administration does, at times, lead to interesting tension, the other issue for Glanty was to bridge the gap between Glanty’s highly agile ways of working and many customers more traditional view of projects and programmes.”

Though great at development, the team felt they were not doing well enough at engaging with their larger clients. Most of Glanty’s staff did not have PPM experience and needed to be supported—through both education and tooling—to engage with clients, build and manage the relationships and deliver value.

The solutions

Glanty has used Atlassian tools, such as Jira and Confluence, from the outset to manage their development backlog. To give clients the reassurance they needed, and to demonstrate progress, Glanty wanted to be able to quickly and flexibly pull development work into PPM structures to create reports both aesthetically pleasing and conveying the necessary information. Looking for usable apps across the Atlassian Marketplace, Glanty opted for BigPicture and BigTemplate. And these two, as Ian himself says, have proved instrumental in progressing Glanty’s PPM approach. The Big Jira plugins improved the visibility of commitments made externally to clients and to the market in general and, as a result, promoted better delivery against client expectations.

“Initially, BigPicture allowed me to demonstrate the benefits to our product and sales staff of a PPM approach; how it would help them manage the client relationships,” explains Ian. “Quickly they began to understand how it could both improve their reporting to clients and how it could give them visibility (and, therefore, better insight) into the development backlog – so that they can have better conversations with the development team and have better influence of product priorities.”

Ian also highlights that the timely and substantial support from SoftwarePlan has played a role in the team’s overall satisfaction with BigPicture: “We have raised a number of issues during our evaluation, all of which have been addressed/responded to by the SoftwarePlant team in a fantastic time frame. A joy to work with.”

The Future

Asked whether they plan to expand the app’s usage into different processes and teams in the company, Glanty’s CTO says that BigPicture is already rolling across development, product, and sales. As the company increases the number of projects, as they take on more agents, BigPicture is expected to become the standard way of work at Glanty.