Problem In More Detail
To create reports for consulting work, Audiokinetic had to go through a long process of pulling all the tasks within an epic, grouping them and double checking if the time was logged in the correct month. Until doing this, they could not see if they were going over budget.
Audiokinetic would have to set up a custom query per project, to sum work done in different Epics and monitor the time logged by users on these projects. It was a weekly process for each Cost-Plus project getting close to the budgeted hours.
Furthermore, the reports were only accessible to management.
Solution Using Epic Sum Up in More Detail
Using the Epic Sum Up Container feature was the key to ending time consuming data extraction. It allows Audiokinetic to oversee what is being done by multiple teams in one view.
Each team can still have their own Epics. But the product manager has a single Container to get an overview. A powerful tool to see what is happening on an ongoing basis before it becomes a problem.
Thanks to Epic Sum Up, we can measure progress at a glance.
Senior Director of Production
The ability to set a budget proved especially useful for tracking. Team leads and project managers use it on a daily basis. They even started using it for internal projects.
How Audiokinetic Got Epic Sum Up in Place
IT initially installed the plug-in. The Jira admin spent a couple of hours to configure it. At one point the Jira admin was hesitant to activate the Container in Container function so she reached out to support to make sure.
The only hurdle they encountered was a configuration issue unrelated to Epic Sum Up (something to do with how Jira and Confluence manage their users). Once fixed, the Epic Sum Up plug-in and all their reports were showing up properly in both Jira and Confluence.
Painless set up, no complex configuration required. An intermediate Jira admin can handle it.
The time progress custom field from Epic Sum Up has been created and displayed in a Jira dashboard showing the current status of each epic in the portfolio.
This lack of need to drill down has been central to the success. Epic Sum Up shows the real-time data across the epic. This ability to see data without creating reports has been a crucial factor in improving estimates for each task and sub-task. Project managers are keeping projects closer to budget.
Little things Audiokinetic Likes About Epic Sum Up
- Overviews everywhere, no need to have to dig or spend time creating custom queries
- Two progress bars (%tasks, %time) and their report are just a click away
- Data within the Epic Sum Up report (a pop up) can be manipulated, for example renaming a task
- Budget pin helps developers when doing a retrospective at the end of the sprint, easy to see when resources need to be moved
