More efficient project management in IT services – GRUPO AVALON
IT services
400+
MS Excel
2020
Grupo Avalon is a Spanish company that provides its customers with IT services, mainly in the field of software. The portfolio of clients of Grupo Avalon is made up of clients of the public sector and private sector, mainly financial services.
Grupo Avalon is a company with a wide experience in the different technologies for software development, especially in Java, Microsoft technologies, and COBOL, with a wide range of functional scopes.
Grupo Avalon has more than 400 employees and 100 projects, of which 25 % are projects of software development and software maintenance using Avalon’s own software processes for new software development, software improvements, and software incidents resolution.
Grupo Avalon uses agile or waterfall methodologies depending on the size and complexity of the project.
From the point of view of agile methodologies, Grupo Avalon uses the SCRUM framework to develop and improve software, and KANBAN for the service management of the software incidents resolution.
For these projects, Grupo Avalon has 100 users in the SaaS-Cloud solution of Easy Redmine.
Challenge
As part of the growth of the company for the next years and aligned with its commitment to quality, Grupo Avalon has decided to use CMMI at its maturity level 5 as the process model to follow.
The organizations that follow this level of maturity are characterized by having projects that use standard processes, such as the Easy Redmine project templates for the different types of established projects, adapted to their characteristics, which allow repeatability and quantitative management based on statistical models.
In turn, these organizations not only define these standards but also provide the projects with a series of process assets. Easy Redmine is one of these assets, and they quantitatively manage the established standard processes.
Agile Board in Easy Redmine
Solution
The Grupo Avalon strategy to follow the chosen process model is based on two principles:
- First the process and then the tool.
- To have the minimum number of tools with wide functionalities that allow concentrating its use to carry out the processes.
From the point of view of the objective maturity level, it is also necessary that the tools serve as a repository of metrics and that the extraction of them in order to establish the different statistical models be effective and efficient.
Easy Redmine has complied with these subsequent points since:
- The tool provides us with the necessary flexibility to carry out the processes and to give service to the projects. It also allows us to implement our two methodological frameworks: SCRUM and Waterfall.
- The functionalities of Easy Redmine allow concentrating in a single tool all the needs in the project management, not only tasks but also requirements, testing, and even the traceability between requirements, the SW that involve these requirements and their testing.
- Easy Redmine allows to establish different types of tasks and record in them the necessary information in such a way that our core metrics are easily calculated and obtained:
- Size of the results of the different processes.
- Effort necessary to carry out the different processes.
- Errors produced in the results of the processes.
- Slippage in the planning of the processes.
- Even in the SaaS-Cloud solution, the extraction of these metrics is simple, by being able to establish in a flexible way different information extraction filters to suit the user's needs and to export its result to files of different formats, such as .xlsx (MS Excel) or .csv, which are easily managed by our specific statistical software: R.
Additionally and from the specific point of view of the SaaS-Cloud solution, according to the experience of Grupo Avalon, the requirements of security, confidentiality, and service level are adequately covered.
In short, Easy Redmine has met the expectations necessary to carry out our objectives.
WBS in Easy Redmine
