Partners

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.

Atlassian alumni make up a part of the Easy Agile team, with several former Atlassian staff working within the Easy Agile business. We had a chance to speak to another member of this extended alumni ‘family’,  Boris Berenberg. Boris is an ex-Atlassian who eventually went on to found the New York HQ Atlassian Solution Partner Atlas Authority.

It was a particularly exciting day for us to catch up with Boris, as after a mere 3 1/2 years, Atlas Authority achieved Gold Partner status with Atlassian.

Personally, I had the pleasure of working just metres away from Boris in the San Francisco office. It was great to hear his journey, and learn how the Atlas Authority team have grown to double-digit staff members based in multiple countries in such a short amount of time. Meet Atlas Authority, an Easy Agile Partner.

How did you end up working for Atlassian?

I found Atlassian because a friend that I went to college with told me about this company that he was working for that paid to send him to Amsterdam for three months. And I thought that sounded cool. So this ‘perk’ was the driver for me getting into it.

An obscure way to ‘find Jira’!

Well, I started my in-depth learning of Jira at Atlassian because I helped write a lot of the performance tuning documentation when I was there. A lot of this work was done by the Sydney support team and I ended up dealing with most of the performance-related tickets that were coming into the San Francisco office at the time.

So when I left Atlassian, my particular skill set that very few other people had was, how do you make your Jira faster?

How do you get a performance improvement on Jira?  That was my expertise.

So after Atlassian, you started Atlas Authority?

I needed something after Atlassian and I went to work for another company.  During the interview process I recommended they look for a  contractor for a few months but they still felt the role required a full-time staff member. So I joined them. It was a great job and a great team. Three months in, I was sitting there with nothing to do, kind of like I had predicted. So I went to the CTO, who was my boss at the time, and I said, look, my number one mandate has been to reduce Atlassian spending at this point. I'm going to go work somewhere else and wishing you guys the best of luck.

And at that point, I went to go work at Uber, and Uber was probably the best team I've ever worked on in my life. We're working with one of the largest Atlassian deployments in the world at the time; we were just all on the same page. Having that level of understanding and shared expectations on a team was just out of this world.

So because of my tenure at Uber, I had some ideas at the time around how an Atlassian practice should be run and I started Atlas Authority to see if my ideas were right or wrong. If my ideas turned out to be right to some subset of the market, then we could be a successful company.

I guess three and a half years later, we are. We are now almost 10 people in 3 countries.

So would you class your expertise as being Atlassian application performance focussed today?

Well we used to focus specifically on that, for instance, we helped the largest telco in America reduce their average Jira page load time from 12 seconds to 4.5 seconds. So a huge improvement.

At the same time, whilst our business grew, Atlassian was doing a really great job of improving the performance and stability of Data Center deployments, and they've done a really great job in Jira 8.0 around indexing performance. If you monitor Jira releases, you'll see that there's a pretty steady stream of performance-related and scale-related issues being resolved.

We knew that we couldn't continue to focus on that. We've kind of become a more general Atlassian partner at this point. We still tend to work with very large Data Center deployments with people doing highly technical implementations that involve very heavy, hands-on analysis, or writing custom code. We do data transformations from migrations from and to the cloud. We help with plugin migrations. Still very complex problems, but different from where we started.

Today, we also have a portfolio of 13 Atlassian Marketplace apps we call our own.

Were these marketplace applications from customer needs?

We created Atlas Authority’s marketplace business in a couple of different ways. Atlassian has a regular event called Ship It. Back in the day when I first joined, the support team was notorious for not participating in these events because while everyone else can stop doing their jobs for 24 hours, the support team found it hard to participate because they had to respond to customers. So I did my best to participate.

I created the Markdown Macro app and took second or third place for that Add-on during the ShipIt. And I won a ticket to the Dropbox developer conference at the time when the Developer Relations team picked me as their winner.

When we got started with Atlas Authority, Atlassian actually granted us the ability to continue to manage that plugin. And so at this point, it's grown to about 5000 installations and millions of end users. We push updates to it regularly & it started our journey into the Atlassian Marketplace.

Which add-on do you think solves the biggest problem?

Our customers are predominantly large organizations. Communicating within them is tough. For instance, people will say, “Hey, you know, my CTO doesn't understand the work that we do in Jira. If we purchase a reporting plugin, it may serve that information up better”. The thing is, a CTO doesn't want to go to Jira in the first place.

Most CTO’s sit in twelve meetings a day and make technical decisions. There’s not a lot of time to go digging through a tool. So providing a Monday morning email that summarizes exactly what's going on in the various initiatives automates updates and improves communication.

It means that you can bring the right message, in the right format, to the right person, at the right time.

The ‘push’ nature and the ubiquity of email makes our Notification Assistant for Jira a real elegant solution.

Does Atlas Authority use Agile methodologies to run the business?

I have had an interesting journey with Agile because when I was working at Atlassian, I built a tool using my 20 percent time. The tool did great, but the project completely failed because we hit the goals of the finance team and not the support team that was paying for the work that we were doing. So classic project failure scenario. A really hard lesson, and a reminder why a core tenant of Agile is to ensure your stakeholders are involved in what you’re building.

Now in the consulting world and owning our own products, we deal with Agile constantly, both in a delivery capacity as well as an internal capacity. Internally, we happen to use Scrum for a lot of the software development work we do. We heavily utilize Kanban on the support side.

So that was how you ran into Easy Agile products?

We were essentially using Easy Agile Roadmaps for two things. Our product development org is a bit scrum-fall. A portion of waterfall at a high level. Similar to program level planning, or doing theme or initiative level planning, but using a roadmap. And then we break it down as we get close to it and use a more traditional methodology to accomplish that.

On the other side, we were also using Easy Agile Roadmaps as a tool to visualize our consulting engagement work. As a way of seeing which customer engagements are running in parallel and what resources are associated with those customer engagements.

If we have a person working part time on a  customer migration, and that migration is going to take three months, we need to be able to visualize that. We needed a light-weight tool that could deliver this for us at that time.

So you use Easy Agile Roadmaps to run your business! We are honoured. Have you encountered us at any customer sites?

We do, but we don't notice them for all of the right reasons!

We resell a lot of plugins, and a strong statement of support of Easy Agile’s tools is they work so well that we don't have to do very much handholding of customers. We don't have to do a ton of training. The UX is done really well. The visual design is done in such a way that it fits into the narrative of Jira as visual design. So a user doesn't need to learn a new visual terminology.

From a performance perspective, from some other vendors, we may see obscure issues. For instance, when we may see a background synchronization job running and it’s causing everything to slow down. Another common issue that we see is that large organizations tend to have similar time-based patterns of plugin usage when it comes using these tools. Another example is when everybody across the organization does their P.I. planning on the same day at roughly the same time.

If that tool is not built in such a way that takes into account this parallelism you can encounter serious problems when people are depending on the product. A lot of the time an application may have low usage 90 percent of the time. And then 10 per cent you will encounter crazy spikes in terms of what that application is asking Jira's backend to do which can make it all fall over.

I don't think we've had to deal with a single complaint about Easy Agile apps in three and a half years of consulting. That's amazing.

Thanks for your time Boris, but I have to ask, did you ever get to Amsterdam?

So that's a great question. So during my interview with Atlassian, they asked me why I applied. I mentioned the secondment was a common thing I heard about the company. They said, absolutely, you can do that with us. I should have gotten it in writing as it took over 3 years to get there!

But it was worth it the wait, I had an amazing time. I loved Amsterdam and I've gotten back five or six times since then.

It's been one of my favourite cities in the world that I've ever gone to and I particularly enjoyed working with the team there.

Atlassian Authority has been acquired by Modus Create.

Need help? Get in touch with Modus Create or follow them on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook.

In 2022, Easy Agile and JXL for Jira joined forces to enhance how customers can plan, track and get an overview of their data. When working in Jira, lots of users struggle organising their data at scale and even resort to exporting it to a Google sheet, MS Excel spreadsheet or Smartsheet to make sense of it.

Enter the partnership between Easy Agile and JXL for Jira.

Get everything you love about Easy Agile Programs in one of the marketplace’s fastest growing paid apps, JXL for Jira. By using Easy Agile Programs and JXL sheets together customers can easily plan and stay on top of their work by inline editing their issues in tables and visualising them in completely customisable hierarchy structures.

About Fine Software & JXL for Jira

Fine Software is backed by Atlassian Ventures and founded by Atlassian alumni with a combined 15 years of experience leading teams at the company. Their passion is to craft beautiful software that really helps you get your job done. JXL is their flagship app, currently among the top 3 fastest growing paid apps on the Atlassian Marketplace, and used by many of the biggest Atlassian customers.

JXL is a game-changing issue editor and organiser that combines the power of Jira with the familiarity of spreadsheets. Users can create and inline edit issues in highly customisable tables, copy and paste fields in bulk, sum up fields, group and structure issues in custom hierarchies, and much more. JXL performs at any scale to save users clicks and hours, no matter what they use Jira for.

About Easy Agile & Programs

Easy Agile products help software development teams effectively deliver quality solutions to their customers. The team behind Easy Agile has spent a combined ten plus years working for Atlassian in product management and engineering roles on GreenHopper / Jira Agile, Jira and HipChat. Happy Easy Agile customers include Daimler, BMW, Twitter, Cisco, NetApp, Johns Hopkins University, DigitalOcean, Deloitte, Veolia, Dimension Data, Bloomberg, Adidas and Bosch.

Easy Agile Programs

Easy Agile Programs is the complete PI Planning solution for Jira. Ideal for distributed, remote or face-to-face Program Increment Planning, Programs helps agile teams align at scale, visualise dependencies and bring focus to their team planning.

Solving customer problems together

When planning, prioritising and managing your work increments and releases in Jira, visualising hierarchy and grouping issues can be tricky. Jira offers epic, base and sub-task level issue hierarchy out of the box but agile program planning and project management at scale need fast and completely customisable issue structure with multiple levels.

With JXL, users can group and structure their teams’ work just the way they need it. They can define issue structure levels in sheets based on issue types and issue links, and sprinkle in field groupings and sum-ups for the ultimate overview and editing experience.

Today, users can also integrate Easy Agile Programs information into their JXL sheets, organising issues with the app’s Program and Program Increment fields. The fields can be used in a number of ways, including:

• Adding as table columns to JXL sheets
• Grouping issues by the fields
• Defining custom issue structures with these grouping criteria

Check out the apps on Atlassian Marketplace and see how JXL and Easy Agile Programs are transforming how users work and manage their data.

Find us on the Atlassian Marketplace

Marketplace listing Easy Agile Programs

Marketplace listing JXL

This blog post was created in collaboration with JXL for Jira.