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Software delivery platform

Increasing software delivery intelligence

Illuminating the software delivery process black box to make better decisions

Year 2021
Role Director of Design
Sector Software Development

About the company

The market leader of value stream management solutions for enterprise IT, improves the speed and quality of software creation by capturing, visualizing and analyzing critical indicators of every aspect of the delivery process.

Problem

Software release management is complex at the enterprise level. Multiple release pipelines, diverse teams using different frameworks and the dependency between them increase the risk of disrupting services on productions or failing to meet strict compliance rules. The software delivery process is a black box for executives and directors

Can we connect all the information and teams to add visibility and improve the intelligence and efficiency of the software delivery process?

Software delivery pipeline
Delivering enterprise software is not easy. The information is fragmented with each team using different tools and methodologies. The Plutora platform connects data and people, but there is a need to improve its value.

Research

Our customers' needs

We interviewed customers at the director level to understand their requirements and what they need to report to the executive team to identify the issues and opportunities to improve.

Office Man

Listening to our experts

We ran workshops with our customer success team to understand their work in custom reports created for specific customers.

Worker Women

The data we have

We worked closely with the engineering team to understand what data we had and what relationships we could establish between different data sets. We also explored the data visualisation developed for specific customers to recognise the constraints, issues and success cases.

Card Index

Findings

Our research was extensive, covering multiple angles and integrating various teams. In this way, we aligned the organisation with the needs of this project.

Release Management Stages
Software development has multiple stages. In each of them, there are tasks or needs that had to be covered with reporting capabilities.
release managemnet reporting insights
We prioritised and categorised the most important needs and problems to enable a successful reporting function.

Long time to value

In the sales cycle, it was difficult to demonstrate the platform’s value. It took a huge amount of work to create a custom dashboard, delaying the closing of new deals.

hourglass

Disconnected dashboards

Many customers had custom dashboards with similar reporting capabilities using our Tableau integration, and it was difficult to replicate them for new customers for specific customisations. Furthermore, our team spent too much time maintaining and updating each of them.

Broken heart

Lack of an ongoing work view

The majority of our reports were for the end stage of the software delivery cycle. We didn’t have a real view of the ongoing process. This made it difficult to track progress and find issues early.

Eye

Status and dependencies nightmare

Releasing software at the enterprise level is extremely complex. Release managers or product managers must handle multiple dependencies of systems every time they release a new piece of software. It’s very difficult or almost impossible to have a centralised view to create a risk assessment.

Zombie

Customers generated their reports

Our customers were generating custom reports based on data aggregation from multiple tools. Besides being inconvenient, it required intensive manual work, which was extremely valuable for them. We found some interesting insights here.

Tools
Plutora old reporting on Tableau
Views of a few reports on Tableau for specific customers

Solution: Embed the analytics

In the example below for release management, we want to answer the following questions: How is the release going? How are the stories progressing? Is the team on track?

Wireframes

We used wireframes to work on some ideas for the right spot on the platform to add reports. Should it be the homepage, the entities view or the tables?

wireframe dashboard exploration
Dashboard wireframe exploration of the layout and functionalities
wireframe tables visualisation
Exploration of the tables with visualisations and drill-in options
wireframe reports visualisation
Multiple reports with data visualisation ideas

Asking for feedback

Throughout the exploration process, we asked for feedback from multiple internal stakeholders and customers to reinforce our hypothesis. In general, we were able to obtain excellent feedback and ideas on how to improve.

Final design

Our final solution was to integrate the relevant data and visualisation into the entity's data tables. For example, in the releases list, you can check the status of each phase, the changes and the test progress.

You can also have a comprehensive view of a specific ongoing release. In the analytics tabs, there’s a dashboard with multiple reports to check the status, changes, environments and deployment status.

This solution was a game changer for managing multiple releases.

Release Insights Dashboard
Releases table with columns presenting the phases, activities, changes and test status
Ongoing release dashboard
Inside the release entity view, we added a new tab to display dashboards. In this example, you can see the ongoing or live dashboards with multiple relevant reports to check the status

Solution: Out-of-the-box dashboards

The additional dashboards and reports to manage ongoing releases were awesome for our customers. However, we wanted to help them to track and share the performance of their software delivery factories at a high level.

We explored the most needed KPIs and what the software delivery market was asking for. Then, we started the process of generating an out-of-the-box dashboard for each function of the platform.

We wanted to answer questions like

These important questions are at the core of the value that the Plutora platform adds to large enterprises.

Proof of concept

We coordinated with the engineering team to quickly elaborate on a functional proof of concept dashboard. In this case, it was for a high-level release management KPIs view.

release kpis proof of concept
Screenshot of the first functional proof of concept of a release management KPIs dashboard

Final design

We continued exploring how our dashboard should work. How fast can we get the data needed or how fresh should they be? We defined all the requirements with engineering and product management and began building dashboards. We started with the value stream management and release management dashboards to provide our customers with a standardised view of their performance.

Value Stream Management Dashboard
Full view of the value stream management dashboard
Release Management Dashboard
Full view of the release management dashboard

Conclusion

These reports added an important layer of value to our platform. Simply presenting them made a huge difference in the sales process.

The current customers loved the reports, and we were able to see heavy use of the reports daily. It was an interesting project to work on, and the complexity of software delivery made it a challenge to find a solution that fits all the different scenarios.

The approach of having basic reports and scaling from there was correct to show the platform in all its potential.

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