Sage expands Plandek rollout
technology-wide following successful adoption by teams
engineers in the initial rollout sample
engineers enabled by Plandek today
Plandek rating
The Challenge
Navigating a product-delivery transformation with limited macro visibility
Sage is a global academic publisher of books, journals, and library resources with a growing range of technologies to enable discovery, access, and engagement. The academic industry is going through a transformative period moving from traditional collection-centric approaches to more patron-centric ones. Technology delivery at Sage is also going through delivery transformations, moving from a project to product approach that requires changes to mindset and approach, particularly in measuring the value of delivery and how delivery happens.
Before employing Plandek, Sage tried to build their own value stream management capabilities within Atlassian and Azure, before looking to the Software Engineering Intelligence (SEI) market for better tooling.
Why Sage decided to use Plandek
From research, Sage found Plandek to be the best in class when it comes to adoption support, coaching and training. Daniel saw this as a key differentiator when comparing Plandek with other tools.
To find an alternative solution to JIRA reporting or Azure reporting. These toolsets lacked insight at a macro level and would require significant effort in terms of data computation and storage to meet their use case of generating visibility across their organization’s software delivery lifecycle (SDLC).
To gain greater insight into the entire SDLC, with improved visibility and insights across all levels of the organization.
To put actionable insights back into the hands of teams for improved autonomy at team level.
The Solution
Embedding Plandek in a way that builds trust — not surveillance
Plandek has been embedded into Sage’s infrastructure and workflows in a way that worked best for them, providing confidence to the key stakeholders that the tool will drive improvement but also to the developers that it won’t be used as a form of surveillance. Implementation was the easy part; Sage’s challenge was more around adoption and cultural shifts for their teams.
“Establishing the data connections needed to use the tool was easy. The biggest issue was how were we at Sage going to use it, what are meaningful metrics? Any new company making this cultural change will have to go through this journey though as it’s where the industry is moving to, so it’s not a problem it’s a learning curve”.
Sage started using Plandek with a smaller sample of their teams (roughly 100 engineers out of a total scope of 350). This staggered approach allowed Sage to understand the team’s level of maturity based on how effectively they adopted the tool. From here, we could gauge the organizations’ appetite for a tool like Plandek and cater our approach accordingly.
The Outcome
A measurable shift in mindset — from “why metrics?” to “how can metrics help?”
“The successful process of re-architecture and re-evolution that Plandek has driven at Sage has been invaluable. It’s early days for hard statistics, but the business change alone is a huge success.”
As a result of adopting Plandek, Sage has seen huge improvements across the wider engineering function, including:
Greater insight and visibility across SDLC
Ease of access to data & metrics
Agile maturity and workflow efficiency
Process governance
Formal quality gates and assurance
Macro level performance benchmarks
Cohesive infrastructure and channels of communication
Following the successful adoption of Plandek by Daniel’s teams at Sage, the organization sponsored the tool for a technology-wide rollout, to continue driving Sage’s culture of measurement forward.
The Business Impact
Establishing a delivery standard that empowers teams and aligns leaders
Greater insight and visibility were initially top of Sage’s priories, so the ease of access to this via Plandek was a big win alone. Daniel added that this unlocked the ability to benchmark where they’re at, so they can better plan for where they want to go; it’s created a delivery standard.
“Before there was an element of ‘how are we performing?’. We used to be disconnected, but now the teams have autonomy [with] guidelines to operate within. We can push them to be better in a healthy way.”
Plandek has now been fully adopted at Sage as an essential tool to help them navigate the period of delivery transformation they’re experiencing, through the power of insights.
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