Meet Design Industries - Easy Agile Partner
Earlier this year on a call with Michael Dockery, Chief Strategist of Design Industries (DI) in Melbourne, Australia, I asked: "What could we do better?"
Michael said, "...a way for vendors that worked with us to improve the way partnerships are promoted."
With that suggestion, the Easy Agile Meet the Partner interview series was born. Fittingly, our first interview is with the company that suggested the initiative.
Design Industries are obsessed with improving the productivity of their Enterprise & Government clients. They do this by optimising their clients' usage of Atlassian tools and implementing best practices while ensuring the platform and apps remain highly available through their partnerships with AWS and Ali Cloud.
Here is a conversation we had with Michael, Philip (Marketing & Comms Director) and Alice (Executive Business Partner). We discussed who they are and what they do, including some common IT acronyms you can learn about if you look them up :)
How did you encounter the Atlassian Platform?
Michael: Design Industries started as a web development company. We were doing custom code, then e-commerce content management systems, web builds, startup consulting, custom API mapping - all sorts of stuff! We took up Atlassian for our service delivery as we were using SVN, I think it was Base Camp, and other tools at the time. We knew we needed something else. I looked at lots of platforms for years and was looking at every project management tool out there.
I noticed Jira and thought that it looks complicated, a bit overwhelming, and then I saw the price - this was when Atlassian released their software as a service product - $10 for ten users! Everything else was $160 per user per month, so we took it up, and in hindsight that was a great decision.
And where is the Design Industries business today?
Michael: We're now half in Melbourne, half in Cebu in the Philippines. We support clients across Australia and help them to make the most of the Atlassian stack. Most of what we do is assisting around project management solutions, so organisations come to us and say, "We want to use Atlassian," or, "We are using Atlassian for project management, can you help us?" And the primary use case is around ITSM (IT Service Management), where they want to run some type of ITIL practice, so we help out with that.
There are also a lot of custom scenarios: a marketing, finance or HR team wanting to improve their workflows. What we've done is created predefined configuration sets for all those different types of operational core competencies to solve their recurring challenges.
Essentially we help organisations fast-start their practice or give a quick uplift to their capabilities by implementing these predefined configuration sets. This is how we support leading companies to make the most out of the Atlassian Enterprise stack. The next step is not only to support the platform and enhance its capability: it's being able to do that on a continual basis - which is where we are leading the market.
What we do with a lot of our clients is continually deliver improvements to the platforms: whether that's improvements in configurations or reporting; additional plugins; retiring other software platforms in the environment; onboarding teams and functions; integration with other platforms and applications in the background.
Are there any notable customer projects that you could mention?
Michael: There are quite a few listed on our website. We helped a significant retailer move onto the Atlassian platform as a core operations piece, assisting them in standing up their Atlassian Data Center environment. We put our standardised configurations for project management in and then we migrated their disparate platforms onto a primary enterprise instance. They were able to standardise and consolidate their Atlassian instances, so that was pretty cool!
Then there was another notable sizeable financial company. Again, Design Industries helped them stand up an Atlassian stack with our predefined configuration sets and, this time, in our managed AWS service. We then took the encrypted data from their parent company and imported it into this new environment. It has now grown to be the enterprise stack — their core delivery platform.
Philip: Each time another major company comes to us, it helps build our pool of knowledge. We often hear customers saying, "Wow! What, you mean you can press a button stand up an Atlassian instance? And then we have enterprise maturity as a scalable framework?"
We respond with, "Yeah, that's what we sell here. We give you a step-change in your organisational efficiency."
Where do you see common pitfalls occur when a customer begins deploying Atlassian tools?
Michael: That's simple — doing it yourself, giving too much Administration rights to people who aren't trained, aren't qualified and implementing it in an ungoverned way. That's a big mistake! However, I've seen it work as a change strategy. You know you can't make such a massive change without allowing people to do it themselves. So throw it over the fence go "OK, here is the tool, run with it" and then hope that the users get excited. When they get excited, then come back and retrofit the policy and do the cleanup, put the process on top and then retrain everyone.
If you've worked in IT or change management before, I'm sure you would agree taking that strategy is a costly mistake. It's better to do it the right way from day one and govern it with a vision in mind. It's an enterprise platform, not an insignificant piece. What part of "mission-critical" don't people understand?
Amongst the Atlassian ecosystem, is there anything that excites you as being "the future"?
Philip: Automated test cases!
Michael: What excites is it's pretty unlimited what we can do, and the capabilities are going to increase. I can see how this platform is beautifully set for some future trends, particularly around automation. I'm just excited that there's so much to do in this space. There are so many businesses that could use the capability that the platform can bring, and most - even if they've already got it - are barely scratching the sides of what's possible. We could close the doors for six months and work on ourselves and our processes!
Philip: Two years ago, we were having conversations about the massive efficiency that could be gained in government by taking on more Agile Project Management. There is so much waste that goes along with poorly managed projects and the associated rework. Then there are things like responding to natural disasters, where you can stand up a fit-for-purpose project management environment, notify the relevant people, get co-ordinating and deliver change on the ground.
Michael: Automated responses to predefined plan execution. I can think of so many things!
So when it comes to Agile, where are your customers these days?
Michael: What is interesting with Agile is the world has turned. I think everyone is now somewhere in the Agile journey, and that has changed from a few years ago. I guess the approach and the degrees of success vary significantly between our clients. Walking into offices, I still see many wallboards and sticky notes. There is always room for improvement.
The journey has begun. Some are doing it well; most can improve; everyone is in the middle. It's interesting times in the space.
There's the opportunity to optimise Agile processes everywhere!
Michael: I think it's just hard! I read about what they call "zero budgeting", which is a method to do budget allocation for Agile projects.
That is such a massive shift in how projects get funded and defunded. If you're going to sit there and say, "OK, we want to measure the value that's being returned on a live basis so that we can fund and defund on an agile basis," you've got to have the tooling in place. If you can't do proper portfolio reporting, you can't tell me what all of your initiatives are.
That means you have to have some type of standardisation in the delivery tool and in the portfolio. You can sit there and go, "OK, I can see my initiatives. I can see what's delivering value. I'm now going to make a monthly budget decision."
So it gets away from these big projects, where most of the C-Level still operates, to where they make funding decisions once a month. These decisions are much smaller, and they're based on who's doing well.
With Agile, there are different interpretations and you've seen different maturity levels in organisations. What resources do you provide to customers? How do you help them find clarity?
Michael: In terms of resources, I used to buy a book called The Lean Startup and give it away like crazy. So that teaches you Lean and Agile, and I think people need to go through the Agile "light bulb" moment. I very distinctly remember when I had my light bulb moment with Agile - there was a before and after. Before, it was confusion, and after, "Aha! I understand this now!" I still think that goes on for a lot of people.
The other one is Lean, and I think that's part of the Agile "light bulb" thing. As a senior stakeholder, you want to achieve things; you're going to invest in things. But having an understanding of what a lean approach looks like, and how a lean approach can be executed, helps a senior executive who typically won't have the time to go out to Agile training. It helps them get a sense of how to structure work, make it small, deliver some value.
The Lean Startup book was what you used to advise before. What do you do now?
Michael: * jokingly * I tell people to get the book!
In all seriousness, there are a couple of principles that you need to understand, and they are similar but different. Waterfall has milestones, Agile has a release. Waterfall has a week of work, Agile has a sprint which you set yourself. For example, a sprint may be one, two or three weeks - we use weekly. You get up on a Monday and say "What are we delivering this week?"
The benefit of Agile is delivering value fast and getting feedback fast, to inform your next delivery. In Waterfall, you're following a predetermined plan that is resistant to change. I like to think of it is as "What are we doing this week?" in Waterfall and "What are we delivering this week?" in Agile.
Lean-Agile is the next step, coupling lean principles to Agile methodology. It's well worth understanding if you're looking to the future. The Lean Startup, it's a classic. People ask, "How do you start a business? What's the most you need?" The most you need is literally a piece of paper and a pencil, and he gives examples of this. You can then say "I don't need $100k to start a business. I need a piece of paper and a pencil." It becomes a lot more achievable.
With these lean startup principles, what have you seen in large enterprise or government that has been successfully deployed?
Michael: They will talk about it in The Lean Startup and call it a "Tiger Team", and that's how most organisations have ended up doing it. Find a team that is a bit more innovative, a bit more flexible and seed the practice. Then with executive support, go, "OK, we're going to change the methodology. How do we do this? How do we find a team who's up to it?" You then get them trained, get them implemented, get the process sorted, get a best practice approach, you roadshow it and roll it out to the organisation. I think that's happened for the executives that have decided to go to Agile. The rest are just fumbling through at the moment.
Where do they need help if they're fumbling through?
Michael: More of a realisation that the toolchain is really important. Agile means you still need to have a written process. You need to have an elaborated work breakdown structure, and make it clear to the team how they're going to break up the work and put it through the system, even though they're "Agile". It still requires a project management configuration and then portfolio reporting.
If you've got the teams running their own processes, it's highly ineffective. We see divisions such as, "Team A are using Story Points, Team B use Estimation, Team C use nothing... and Team D, well, they kind of do it their own way - I think they're Waterfall". What a mess!
The whole process requires someone responsible. Most organisations have this initiative going on called "digital transformation". It requires an individual who is in charge of digital transformation to be able to make decisions on methodology when it comes to project management and how that interrelates with the tooling.
Philip: I think of it like showing senior executives fire for the first time. They haven't ever had reporting down to the level we are talking about once you've got the bottom up using this toolset. Previously, the reporting culture was, "Can you provide us with five slides for the senior exec or the board pitch?" where now it comes to, "Well, you can report on everything now at the click of a button and you can see it in real-time."
So it empowers at the top level, and it frees people up to work on high-value tasks.
You mentioned Eric Ries with The Lean Startup. Any other thought leaders that you follow?
Michael: *laughing* McLaren.
Philip: Michael's obsessed with Formula 1. It's a bit of a driving force behind how we do things here.
Michael: Formula 1 certainly is an interesting analogy. I don't know if it is in terms of thought leaders, but in terms of an area of inspiration, definitely Formula 1 and how it works because there's a lot to it. It's teamwork.
It's high-performance teams, high-performance machines. I look at the way we configured the tooling, and it's our high-performance machine.
It's probably not as exciting as a Formula 1 car, but it's what we've got, and we certainly get to drive it - but it's not as dangerous either!
We know you love Easy Agile apps. Any other Atlassian Marketplace apps you love recommending?
Michael:Riada Insight Asset Management is really powerful. For a lot of organisations when it comes to ITSM tooling, the monitoring tooling, the asset management tooling, and the ticketing tooling aren't integrated. It is quite tangled. So when an organisation is looking at Jira Service Desk, it's a no brainer.
Then there is Tempo Time Tracking. When one of our clients want to bill their clients, or they need to manage their budgets effectively, it works perfectly. It also lends towards capacity management. A lot of organisations struggle with their capacity management. Using that suite makes it super easy.
Lastly, if a customer would ever like to get in touch, what's the best way?
Philip: They call us at 1300 736 363. They can also fill out a contact form on our website. The form gets responded to quickly. We generally respond within an hour. We usually then book in a call. If it is a relatively straightforward request, we can get a proposal back within 12-24 hours.
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ProductRethinking our UI: How Easy Agile innovates for a better user experience
At Easy Agile, we’re constantly looking for new ways to improve our products, and one of the ways we foster innovation is through Dash Days—a focused period where our team steps away from daily tasks to experiment, explore, and reimagine how our tools can better serve customers.
During our most recent Dash Days, we took a fresh look at the user interface of two of our flagship products, Easy Agile TeamRhythym and Easy Agile Programs. The goal was to enhance interaction and discoverability, so users can experience the full value of our tools without unnecessary complexity.
Here’s a glimpse into our thought process, challenges, and the exciting solutions we explored.
The challenge
As Easy Agile TeamRhythym and Easy Agile Programs have evolved, we’ve introduced powerful features designed to give users more control and flexibility. However, as new capabilities have been added, the interface has become more elaborate. For us, this presents an opportunity—an opportunity to take a step back, simplify the experience, and help users unlock more of what our products offer.
To address this, we brought people from across the business together to brainstorm how we could improve the experience in both products. Through these sessions, we identified a few core opportunities:
- Discoverability: How do we make it easier for users to find and use the powerful features built into our tools?
- Visibility: What’s the best way to surface the right information and features when users need them?
- Consistency: How do we create a more uniform experience within and across our products to make navigation intuitive?
Armed with these insights, we then set out to explore solutions tailored to each product’s unique challenges.
A more personalized experience with Easy Agile Programs
For Programs, we focused on three “how might we” questions to reframe our challenges into opportunities:
- How might we create more focus on the actions users are trying to complete?
- How might we make navigation more intuitive and easy?
- How might we help users with more context about where they are in the app at any given screen?
Out of the many solutions we explored, the one that got us the most excited was the idea of an Easy Agile Programs Home Screen—a personalized dashboard designed to guide users based on where they are in their planning cycle.
Conceptual sketch of the Easy Agile Programs home screen This home screen could adapt based on where users are in their journey, offering relevant guidance and actions.
- For new users, the home screen could provide clear onboarding steps and easy access to help, so they can get started quickly and confidently.
- For experienced users, it could offer insights and key actions related to their progress, so they can stay focused on what matters most. Users might even see data summarizing their accomplishments, which makes it easier to share successes with their teams.
Whether someone’s brand new to the product or deep into execution, the home screen could be a great way to guide and coach our users—helping them answer questions like, "What should I be doing next?" or "What extra value am I missing out on?".
A more focused interface for Easy Agile TeamRhythm
For TeamRhythym, our three key “how might we” questions were:
- How might we provide more focus within the User Story Map during sprint planning?
- How might we improve the discoverability of issues without epics?
- How might we enhance the layout to highlight key features and improve overall usability?
With these questions in mind, we explored a range of ideas to simplify sprint planning and make it easier for users to prep, plan, and review their work, whether they’re using Scrum or Kanban.
Three steps to simplify sprint planning on Easy Agile TeamRhythm Sprint planning can sometimes feel overwhelming when you have multiple sprints competing for attention. To help users focus, so we explored the idea of introducing a focused view during sprint planning.
- This would allow users to zoom in on a specific sprint and the backlog alone, while collapsing others.
- Each issue would have its own row in the detailed view, and users can drag and drop either an entire row or drag individual issues to quickly rank them based on priorities.
- The sprint view will also hide epics that don’t have linked issues in the current sprint, giving users a cleaner view of what’s relevant to their current work.
Conceptual UI of TeamRhythm User Story Map's focused view for sprint planning 
Conceptual UI of TeamRhythm User Story Map's detailed sprint view We also looked at ways to enhance the User Story Map interface to bring the most useful tools and features to the forefront. By improving how key functionality is presented, we’re helping teams quickly access what they need, when they need it, enabling them to stay productive without interruption.
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Conceptual UI of a more condensed top navigation for TeamRhythm User Story Map This way, we can create a smoother, more focused experience for teams using TeamRhythm, so they can focus on what’s in front of them without being distracted by everything else.
Your turn. What do you think?
At Easy Agile, we’re always thinking about what comes next.
These ideas aren’t on our official roadmap just yet, but they’re the kind of innovations we’re excited to explore.
If you think these changes would improve your experience with Easy Agile TeamRhythm and Easy Agile Programs, let us know! Your feedback helps us decide what to prioritize, so we can continue building tools that truly make a difference for your teams.
WorkflowHow to set your Agile teams up for success
Agile is about empowering teams to take ownership, feel truly engaged, and foster a culture of collaboration. More than ever, teams are required to deliver with greater adaptability, speed, and engagement. The future is more ambiguous and complex, and Agile teams must know how best to respond to these changing conditions.
Agile experts John Walpole, Dean MacNeil, and Nick Muldoon share their success formula behind the high-functioning Agile teams at Lyft, Valiantys, and Easy Agile. You will learn:
- How to create a compelling 'why' that the whole team can get behind
- How to empower your teams
- The qualities of high-performing Agile teams
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Create a compelling 'why' that the whole team can get behind
I think Agile is not a silver bullet. We have people who look at Agile and say, "Oh, well, this is going to solve all of our woes." And it's not; it's certainly not a turnkey thing.
Nick Muldoon, Co-CEO at Easy Agile
Agile is not a silver bullet. It is not a methodology that will solve leaders, teams and individuals' problems. Agile is a continuous improvement journey of "adaptability in evolutionary theory; it's about responding to either a new environment or changes in your environment to again, not just survive but to thrive," said Dean.
Set your Agile teams up for success by teaching them to thrive by empowering them to lead change, make mistakes, build a solid foundation, and be open to learning, changing, and communicating the meaningful 'why' behind their work. You will see an explosion in Agile team success when you have a "cohesive team aligned to a common mission with a growth mindset."
Motivate your Agile teams by connecting their work with a meaningful 'why.' Schedule a meeting to ensure you constantly discuss their work's more profound purpose. Bring up a real-life customer example. John shared, "At Lyft, we share stories in a fortnightly meeting. We offer free accessible rides to those in wheelchairs or those who struggle to pay for a ride but need access to transportation to get to work or school.
"Bring your personas to life with these real-life examples, so it's front and center in your employee's minds," said John.
Empowering your teams
Culture eats strategy for breakfast
Peter Drucker
Your employees need to lead the change. "If you look at great leaders in recent Agile transformations, you might want to look at a company like Porsche," said Dean. Dean shares how Porsche has inspired Valiantys because "every employee at Porsche is leading the change. So they're all bought into it; they all have that sense of leadership to drive it.". Porsche's employees are leading the change because their leadership communicates the 'why' well. "Fun is number one when their CIO lists off the top three reasons 'why' everyone is so fired up about the Agile transformation. Because you can have fun on the job, your job is not supposed to be a grim duty. It's supposed to be something you look forward to."
"Empower your teams to make mistakes," said John.
Empower your Agile teams to fail and make mistakes through powerful questions. Leaders have to change their tone from "oh no, who do I fire?" to "what's the challenge? What can I do to help?". Express to your team that you're on a journey to learn as much as they are. In doing so, the leader humanizes themselves and becomes more vulnerable.
Leadership sets the tone. As a company scales, the responsibility to create the culture and the risk appetite falls more on leadership.
Qualities of high-performing, Agile teams
1. Create a solid foundation
Set your Agile team up for success with a stable team unit. Don't keep moving teams around; create long-term Agile teams to allow individuals to get to know each other and humanize one another. "I think stability is key to having the tacit knowledge keeping together and this open mindset where they're willing to learn; I love that," said Nick.
2. Open to learning and adapting
For Agile teams to continuously improve, they must constantly be learning and adapting. "You can't get that learning and adaptation if you keep just stirring the pot. Because you're going to keep scattering that knowledge, you want to take hold, and then, of course, you want to spread the knowledge to the organization then," said Dean.
3. Share feedback and do the retrospective
Ensure your Agile teams are demonstrating working product on a regular occurrence. If you're practicing Scrum, make sure you are doing the weekly sprint review. This allows the team to receive feedback from stakeholders and keep iterating and moving forward, ensuring they stay in movement. "Do your retrospective," said Dean." We're looking at what we delivered, and now we're going to look at how we delivered it." It is imperative that Scrum teams gather at the end of each sprint to discuss what went well, what didn’t go so well, and what can be improved on for next time. Otherwise, you invite complacency and stagnation into your Scrum process — the antithesis of Agile.
Using Easy Agile to set your Agile teams up for success
Easy Agile TeamRhythm supports your team's Agile practices in Jira. The user story map format in TeamRhythm transforms your flat product maps into a dynamic and flexible visual representation of work. Watch the highlights tour to see how Easy Agile TeamRhythm makes sprint planning, managing your backlog, and team retrospectives easier. Visit Atlassian Marketplace to start your free, 30-day trial today.
Agile Best PracticeSix Tips for Improving Team Collaboration
The 17th State of Agile Report shared that 93% of executives thought that their teams could do the same amount of work in half the time, if their teams collaborated better.
That's quite a statistic. We’ll leave it up to you to decide whether this reflects a lack of efficiency due to poor collaboration, or a disconnect between leadership expectations and the realities faced by development teams.
What we do know is that improving team collaboration has benefits and that improved collaboration is a key benefit of effective agile practices.
So if you think your team could work more effectively, here are six tips for improving team collaboration that we think will make your working life better, and help you deliver for your customers.
1. Agile Teams Are Cross-Functional
Cross-functional teams are the backbone of agile collaboration. It's Agile 101:
The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.
Manifesto for Agile Software Development
Ideally, your agile team should be able to deliver work independently. The skills and expertise of your team should allow you to handle diverse tasks without creating dependencies on other teams. You can take ownership of the software you're delivering.
The benefit of organizing into cross-functional teams is a greater shared understanding of your project, where you can each see how the pieces fit together. This type of collaboration supports the efficient flow of work and ensures that knowledge and skills are consistently shared.
2. Take an Iterative Approach
Or to put it another way, make it easier to fail fast, so your team can learn why, and correct your course. By breaking down large projects into manageable increments, your team can focus on delivering small, functional parts of working software at regular intervals. This approach goes hand-in-hand with continual feedback from users, ensuring that issues are uncovered quickly and dealt with just as fast. This shared team focus on user feedback, and the shared purpose and collaboration that comes with it, is a key benefit of agile development.
3. Maintain Regular and Transparent Communication
Daily stand-ups, sprint reviews, and planning meetings are all designed to foster regular and clear communication. You and your team should see these meetings as an opportunity to share ideas, discuss progress and blockers, and collaborate. If your daily stand-up is nothing more than a shopping list of tasks, then you're doing it wrong.
If your daily stand-up is nothing more than a shopping list of tasks, then you're doing it wrong.
Someone who has wasted too much time in shopping-list meetings.
Beyond team meetings, clear communication is important anywhere the details of your work are shared. Agile tools like Easy Agile TeamRhythm provide a central platform for prioritizing work and tracking progress. With a central source of truth that everyone can access to understand goals, priorities, and team commitment, collaboration can be more effective, keeping the team aligned and focused.
4. Conduct Team Retrospectives
Hot take: regular retrospectives are the most important agile practice your team can adopt.
Team retrospectives provide a structured opportunity to reflect on your work and discuss how it can be done better next time. This is team-led improvement because you and your team are in the driver's seat. Encouraging honest and open discussions during retrospectives helps build trust among team members and fosters a collaborative mindset. By continuing to work on processes and behaviors, you and your team can improve your performance over time and make your working life better.
5. Use Collaboration Tools
The right tools can make a big difference in team collaboration. The best tools provide a reliable source of truth that the whole team can access, in a place where the whole team will access it. It's a simple concept; a shared understanding of the work is supported by shared and willing access to the same information.
Choose a tool that makes it easy for you and your team to access information and keep it updated. If you're already working in Jira, an integration like Easy Agile TeamRhythm provides a better view of your work in a story map format, with goals, objectives, and team commitment all made clear. Team retrospective boards are attached to each sprint (or spun up as required for Kanban teams) so you have your team-led ideas for improvement tightly connected to the work in Jira.
No matter which tool you choose, make sure it will facilitate better alignment, streamline your workflows, and provide a clear picture of roadblocks and progress. By using collaboration tools effectively, your team stays organized, focused, and connected, no matter where each member is located.
6. Build a Positive Team Culture
It may sound obvious, but a positive team culture is essential for effective collaboration. Creating an environment where team members feel valued, respected, and motivated, encourages the psychological safety they need to share their great ideas, learn from missteps, and collaborate more effectively with their colleagues.
High-performing teams recognize the achievements of others, share constructive feedback, and support practices that lead to a healthy work-life balance. Make it regular, and keep it authentic. A positive culture not only improves team dynamics but also boosts overall productivity and job satisfaction.
Successful Team Collaboration
Effective collaboration can be the difference between your team achieving their goals, or falling short. By embracing agile practices like the regular communication that comes from agile planning meetings, to the learnings that come from taking an interactive approach to development, and creating time for team-led improvement with retrospectives, you can seriously boost your team dynamics.
Easy Agile TeamRhythm Supports Team Collaboration
Easy Agile TeamRhythm is designed to make your agile practices more accessible and effective, helping your team plan, prioritize, and deliver work with better alignment and clarity.
Built around a story map for visualizing work and retrospective boards that encourage team-led improvement, TeamRhythm facilitates sprint and release planning, dependency management, backlog management, user story mapping, and retrospectives.
Tight integration with Jira makes Easy Agile TeamRhythm a reliable source of truth, no matter where you and your team members are located.
Watch a demo, learn about pricing, and try for yourself in our sandbox. Visit the Easy Agile TeamRhythm Features and Pricing page for more.
Easy Agile TeamRhythm