Q&A: Rally for Greater Consistency and Productivity Across Divisions

The telecommunications industry is one of the most competitive and fast-paced verticals in the world. Development teams in those environments need to continuously innovate, constantly deliver value, and always strive to improve.

To address these challenges, many organizations are undertaking digital transformation journeys. One top leader of a Fortune 500 telecommunications company we spoke to has seen widespread adoption, increased innovation, and increased productivity across the company thanks to their digital transformation thanks in part to Rally from Broadcom Software.

What are the challenges you need to overcome to be successful?

For us, it’s the need to balance providing our different teams the flexibility to work in a way that works for them, with the need to centrally manage and drive performance. In our industry it’s important that teams are empowered to work how they want, because that drives engagement and productivity. However, we as an organization also need a tool that can adapt to those different approaches while still giving us consistent insight into that work.

How do you go about addressing those problems?

It comes down to having the right tool, implemented and used in the right way. It’s essential that the tool can always adapt and adjust to how we want to work. If we need to compromise because of the limitations of the technology we use, then that tool will be rejected, we won’t have a clear picture of what’s going on, and we won’t be able to make the best decisions for the business. That ultimately hurts the value we can deliver to both our customers and the business. I’m sure our competitors would be happy, but it won’t help us.

What do you do, and how does it help?

When we ran into problems with our legacy tool, we decided to implement Broadcom’s Rally solution. It offers the flexibility to adapt and adjust to different ways of working while still providing us with the ability to report on, track, and manage data across all our different teams.

We didn’t actually mandate that the tool be used; rather, we made it available and encouraged areas to use it if they wanted to. One team — representing almost 20% of our total pool of developers —immediately embraced it, and they have doubled the number of solution and release trains that they manage since starting with Rally.

How is this driving your success?

Since we first implemented Rally, we have increased the number of user stories managed through the tool by a factor of five. We now have over 100,000 user stories flowing through Rally every month, which shows how well it is being embraced by our user groups.

We also have much greater consistency. It was virtually impossible to compare performance across different business areas In our old tool, but thanks to Rally we now have that insight.

Rally also encourages our users to innovate in how they work. We have teams exploring the new timeline functionality, groups looking to leverage the solution for team planning, and RTEs analyzing cumulative flow diagrams. Furthermore, the capacity planning module is driving greater productivity across all our divisions.