We recently sat down with a large chocolate-maker to talk about the challenges of creating delicious candy for an ever-growing market. How can Clarity and Rally help fulfill the cravings of discernible customers? Here’s an excerpt:
What were the challenges you needed to overcome to be successful?
As the technology department for the company, we touch virtually every project, but we lacked insight into what work was happening and where we were investing our resources. We were good at managing projects, but we lacked a portfolio view. That made it hard to know if we were living up to our values of providing employees with a great quality of life, and to know if we had enough people with the right skills to consistently deliver for our customers.
How did you go about addressing those problems?
We focused primarily on a portfolio solution and on understanding and improving our resource management approach. We sought to answer questions around the work we were doing, the people working on them and the remaining capacity (if any). We also wanted to understand the balance and distribution of our work across different areas and disciplines.
What did you do, and how did it help?
We chose Clarity from Broadcom and implemented it with the help of their delivery partner Rego Consulting. It was clearly the best choice for us and we implemented it with a focus on portfolio management first, alongside the resource management functionality. That allowed us to address our two main priorities.
We soon recognized that to optimize our ability to manage work we needed to make changes to how we operate. We restructured the technology group around the capabilities that Clarity delivered and are now looking to strengthen our services with additional hiring – dedicated resource managers, for example.
A number of other areas in the business saw what we were achieving and Clarity is now being expanded to them so that they can also leverage its performance. Even though we have only been using it for a few months, it is rapidly becoming the main tool for the company. We’re already heading towards making it the solution for portfolio and project management for all users.
How is this driving your success?
Quite simply, we better understand our business. We’re starting to use the roadmapping functionality which is help us to understand where our priority projects are and the timeframes for delivery. That’s changing the way people think – we’re encouraging conversations around where the business needs to be in five years.
At the same time, we’re embracing agile within the technology group and looking to leverage SAFe. Clarity is helping us to do that and is integrated with Broadcom’s Rally solution. That will help us further drive effectiveness and efficiency and help us better connect with our customers – improving their purchasing experience.
It also helps us to improve the quality of life for our employees – they are able to work 100% remotely so we were able to adapt seamlessly when COVID-19 hit. We want to be on the leading edge of everything we do, and Clarity is helping us achieve that.
