How Epicflow Helped Bridge the Software Development Process with Project Portfolio Management

Epicflow has helped to connect the IT department of a large US pharmaceutical company with its management and ensure a structured and well-organized workflow.

The Challenges

The company’s software development team has been using Jira Software to support their daily work. However, at some point, they became overwhelmed with their tasks and could hardly get their job done. Additionally, they appeared to be out of sync with the company’s management — Jira didn’t provide them with enough insights into the projects’ and resources’ performance. The company needed to address the following challenges:

Challenge 1: A large backlog and a lack of data on resources’ future capacityChallenge 2: Overloaded team membersChallenge 3: Lack of prioritiesChallenge 4: No flow in projectsChallenge 5: Lack of visibility into the project portfolioChallenge 6: Inability to identify bottlenecks that hamper the flow

So, the company’s management needed to have a comprehensive overview of the whole project environment, be able to properly allocate and manage available resources and improve project performance.

This is where Epicflow appeared as a bridge uniting the software development department using Jira and the company’s management; 
in turn, this helped the developers cope with their work more efficiently.

How Epicflow Helped Tackle the Challenges

N.B.: The integration didn’t require software developers to switch to Epicflow, they could continue working in their familiar environment, while the management had an opportunity to achieve the following benefits. 
  • Seamless data import
    • Data import was the first step of the integration. Everything created in Jira was automatically imported into the Epicflow system without spending long hours doing everything from scratch or making changes manually every time they occurred.

      Data safety should be mentioned separately:

        1) Epicflow complies with the highest data security standards (EU GDPR);
        2) Epicflow has undergone penetration testing, adhering to the standards set by the British Ministry of Defence (MOD).
  • Comprehensive overview of all projects running in a company
    • The company’s management has achieved a high-level overview of the whole project environment to review project and resource performance and identify inefficiencies.
  • Intelligent workload management
    • Epicflow helped adjust resources’ workload and align it with the team members’ available capacity, which eliminated bottlenecks and increased resource efficiency.
  • Bottleneck visualization and resolution
    • Epicflow’s graphs showed what hampered the flow and caused an output decrease. At the same time, its What-if Analysis allowed the management to find an optimum way to resolve these bottlenecks by testing scenarios and analyzing their consequences.
  • Making predictions
    • With Epicflow, the management can now set realistic expectations of the projects’ outcomes as well as prevent bottlenecks using the tool’s predictive capabilities — they can forecast team members’ workload and capacity, which will allow them to plan projects without bottlenecks and ensure smooth workflow.
  • Decision support
    • Having a comprehensive view of the whole project environment and being able to run and analyze scenarios, the company’s management can now make the most reasonable decisions backed with data.
How Epicflow Helped Bridge the Software Development Process with Project Portfolio Management image 2 | Epicflow

The Results: No Chaos, Better Predictability, Increased Output

  1. The company’s IT department continues using Jira to manage their tasks.
  2. The management leverages Epicflow to have a high-level overview of the project environment, identify bottlenecks, make predictions, and improve performance.
  3. Upon the integration of Jira with Epicflow, the IT department showed a significant increase in output with the same amount of work and resources, while the company’s management has achieved perfect visibility and predictability of the workflow.
Other Cases

KPN  — Dutch landline and mobile telecom company

VieCuri — Medical Center is
a top clinical teaching hospital.

Arnold AG — German specialist for high-quality metal products.

TKF — Building, industrial
and telecom solutions for the construction industry.

An Aerospace and Defence company from the UK