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JK Enterprises is a mid-sized company that relies on software to run its growing business. The company depends on a mix of packaged and outsourced applications, as well as software developed in-house. Creating and upgrading these applications is the work of a global team of business analysts, architects, developers, and testers.
JK has been under extreme pressure to reduce costs, improve productivity, and deliver more with less. In an environment where every expenditure is scrutinized, the company was unable to correlate software investments with business results. In fact, JK’s Chief Executive said that it felt like they were throwing money into a black hole.
But now, JK finds itself on the verge of landing an important new client. To win the contract, this new client requires JK to develop specialized online services on-time and on-budget — within an aggressive delivery schedule.
Two months ago, this might not have been possible.
Despite its highly talented technical professionals, the lack of a unified software delivery platform was preventing JK from reaching its goals.
Tools from multiple vendors support the specialized needs of JK’s business experts and analysts, architects, developers, build engineers and test teams.
But without that unified platform, JK’s remote team members found it difficult to collaborate effectively.
Data was locked in each repository and difficult to access. Home-grown integrations across tools were brittle and unreliable. By the time team members found needed information, it was often unreliable and out of date. And because JK lacked end-to-end visibility over its projects, it was forced to create a manual, overlay reporting system that was time-consuming and unreliable.
The situation made it difficult to control costs, and stifled innovation.
Luckily, all that changed.
JK turned to the IBM Rational Jazz platform for collaborative software delivery. Jazz is an IBM initiative to transform software delivery by making it more collaborative, transparent, and productive.
Unlike the monolithic, closed solutions of the past, Jazz is an open platform that breaks down walls between specialized software tools, allowing team members to easily share data in context. And it’s supported by skilled professional services, helping teams adopt a measured approach to continuously improving team agility.
Today, with the prospective client’s demands on the table, JK’s software teams are ready to respond. The client works with JK’s business experts to outline the necessary changes. They collaborate on user interface sketches, use cases and storyboards, and create alternative business process models.
While the business team continues to refine requirements, the development team is hard at work. The team lead quickly creates an iteration plan and assigns work across the team. When team members join the project, they find the complete project plan, along with their individual task list. An out-of-the-box agile workflow keeps everyone on track. Seamless SCM and build support automatically coordinates software deliveries, ensuring that each team member is working on the right task, using the right file version, and delivering to the right workstream.
At the same time, the quality management team in India is already at work on the quality plan. At any time, test team members can compare their test plans and test results with the original requirements. Testing is fast, efficient and highly automated. Team collaboration is as easy as traversing a link to review documents, or starting an instant message conversation.
And because the Jazz platform seamlessly integrates products using a familiar Web architecture, users can harness the power of multiple offerings without borders—accessing tools and data without even needing to think about it.
And those manual status reports? They're no longer a problem, since they have been replaced with real-time insight into project and practice risks, status and trends — with metrics based on real data, not estimates.
IBM Rational Jazz helped JK’s software delivery teams complete the upgrade in less than six weeks, winning a new client and establishing new internal benchmarks for development.
The Jazz unified software delivery platform drives enhanced team collaboration, automation and reporting insight - enabling you to deliver greater value from your software investments.
For more information, contact your Rational account representative, visit us online at ibm.com/rational/jazz, or join our community at jazz.net.