Customer Story

Lightweight Project Management

LOCATION

Uedem, Germany

ABOUT COMPANY

APTIS helps you digitalize knowledge. All our products are built and supported in our office in Germany.

EPIC SUM UP VERSION

Data Center

Server

ATLASSIAN PRODUCTS USE

Jira Software

Confluence

Bitbucket

Trello

JIRA USERS

100

WEBSITE

aptis-solutions.com

Live reports that provide an overview are powerful. But they are not available with Jira out of the box.

APTIS in Germany wanted an overview tool that worked well with smaller projects, not only larger ones. So they decided to build their own app to help manage small to medium-sized Jira projects.

Then seeing how well it worked they decided to sell it to other Jira users on the Atlassian Marketplace. It turned out many others had similar problems and liked the solution they created.

Here is APTIS’ story of how what became the Jira app Epic Sum Up has helped them work smarter in Jira.

Problem Overview:

APTIS needed a better way to work with smaller projects.

Solution using Epic Sum Up Overview:

APTIS customized Jira to use containers to create a more flexible structure. This gives them the ability to bring different issuetypes together.

After it proved to work so well internally it was launched as an app on the Atlassian Marketplace in 2015 called Epic Sum Up.

Problem Solving

APTIS has developers working with story points, and customers and project managers working with time. Yet scrum boards are limited to one dimension – story points or time – which was endlessly frustrating.

They wanted to see progress in terms of both story points and time along with an overview. In particular, how to create projects with tasks from different projects and not just work with issues (example moving around subtasks).

Requirements:

More than one level of hierarchy
Flexible stacking of hierarchies
Create new epics inside issues
Move around subtasks
Choose assignees

Goals:

Agile development, internal projects, customers projects
Easy to setup
Accounting integrated
Get an overview of what’s inside issues

All teams members have an easy to read overview thanks to progress bars that can be clicked on to get full details.

Solution Using Epic Sum Up

Containers to create a new structure
Issuetypes set to use enhanced container functionality
Summary Panel with progress bars for live reporting

“I have handled 70 projects at once. The overview is key.”

Andreas Haaken

CEO, APTIS

Create Custom Functionality

1. Summary Panel

With summary panels APTIS gets an easy to understand overview of issues in a container. The progress bars are key to this easy of use and quick overview.

In one view see any number based value. These are the ones APTIS uses:

Time spent
Estimated time
Remaining time
Time budget
Story points
Status category
Number of attachments
Number of comments

APTIS likes the budget marker in the time progress bar. The summary panel can be customized to only include what is relevant for a team.

2. Easy editing

Fast and easy editing of your project scope (all issues related to your project).

The ability to stack issues from anywhere in Jira into containers is a key to Epic Sum Up helping APTIS’ workflow run smoother.

Features include inline editing, sorting filtering, and bulk editing.

3. Container functionality to any issuetype

The key to make Jira flexible with small projects. We do not use Jira projects as projects, rather we use issues as projects.

This allows us to use workflows as project lifecycles which includes post-function validators and conditions. Adding container functionality to any issue type increases flexibility to stack your issues in structures of any height.

The ability to stack issues from anywhere in Jira into containers is a key to Epic Sum Up helping APTIS’ workflow run smoother.

Related Webinar

Watch this past webinar where Andreas Haaken, CEO and founder of APTIS, discusses how he does lightweight project management in Jira with the help of Epic Sum Up.