Customer Story

Consulting Reports Made Easy with Epic Sum Up

Audiokinetic hero2
Logo-Audiokinetic

LOCATION

Montreal, Canada

Subsidiaries: Tokyo & Shanghai

ABOUT COMPANY

Audiokinetic is the leading global provider of cross-platform audio solutions, empowering creators with its award-winning interactive audio engine Wwise®.

EPIC SUM UP VERSION

ATLASSIAN PRODUCTS USE

Jira Software

Confluence

JIRA USERS

60

SHARE PAGE

Problem Summary:

Audiokinetic must closely monitor consulting projects as they get close to the number of hours agreed upon in a contract. This required time consuming data extraction.

Solution using Epic Sum Up:

Container feature ended time consuming data extraction.

Jump to a section:​

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.

Audiokinetic accesses their timesheet from the time spent report then uses the “filter” option, select “previous month” or a specific time range, and then sort either by User or by task as shown in the screenshot.

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.”
Geneviève Picard
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.

The container feature is used extensively by Audiokinetic. They get the Epic Sum Up Summary Panel on the right side, but also the equivalent of the list of issues in the center section.

Note that Audiokinetic activated the container link only for Epics prior to taking this to screenshot in order to keep this container implementation simple and to avoid having to add Container links in individual issues.

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.

Time spent (view under Detail View in Epic Sum Up) and timesheet are the two views Audiokinetic uses for reports. Audiokinetic accesses their timesheet from the time spent report by clicking on the icon at the bottom left.

Audiokinetic also uses Detail View to spot check progress of a big project.

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