A Case Study of Home Power Solutions with Easy Redmine

Before switching to Easy Redmine

The client used Redmine, which didn’t have a usable resource management feature.

Top challenges:

• Keep an overview in a very complex organization (lots of teams working on hardware and software of one complex system) and reduce complexity with the tool instead of increasing it.
• Implementing SAFe framework in Easy Redmine (i.e. PI-Planning for quarterly planning of epics and SCRUM in between)
• Combination of long-term planning (waterfall) and short-term sprint planning (SAFe PI-Planning and SCRUM)
• Resource Management for individuals and teams
• Summarize information in the tool for reporting
• Graphs/diagrams (possibilities are very limited)

Our assignment and challenges

Expectations to meet:

• Reduce complexity in a very complex organization
• Increase transparency of all tasks that are worked on
• Enable effective prioritization
• Consistently representing the hierarchic structure from company vision to individual task
• Support project planning and steering
• Support program and team management

Requirements:

1. Basic project management features: Gantt charts, milestones, tasks, subtasks, responsibilities, and resource estimations are essential components.
2. Resource management: Including considerations for holidays and other factors impacting resource availability.
3. Project view: Providing a comprehensive overview of ongoing projects.
4. Team view: Allowing teams to see all projects they are involved in.
5. Revision of project plans: Providing the ability to revise project plans as needed.
6. Critical paths: Identifying critical paths within projects for efficient planning.
7. Work Breakdown Structure (WBS): Offering a clear breakdown of responsibilities within projects.
8. Task status tracking: Monitoring the status of tasks throughout the project lifecycle.
9. Documentation of project results: Facilitating the documentation of project outcomes for future reference.
10. Reporting and analysis: Generating reports, including milestone trend analysis, and offering reporting templates for different stakeholders with varying levels of detail and KPIs.

Why Easy Redmine:

• Hybrid project management (agile and waterfall) and resource management
• Features highlights: 
• Resource Management
• Customizability
• Filters

Phases of implementation:

Before implementation, a test server was created, which was thoroughly tested for the above requirements. Since project management in our company was just about to evolve, the processes and concrete use of the tool were not ultimately defined during implementation. Tailoring Easy Redmine to our company and simultaneously implementing project management was the phase that followed using the tool. In the beginning, we met chaos and frustration, but after a while, it was transparency and support of SAFe methodology with increased efficiency of PI-Planning.

1. Settings

In the first step, a detailed structure of projects was defined and implemented. We also imported all tasks from Redmine, because we wanted to keep access to the knowledge documented in those tickets. This, however, led to the difficulty that Easy Redmine was used as a ticketing system with lots of people randomly creating tasks for any idea and allocating them to random projects. This in the end led to a huge chaos.

2. Server solution / Cloud solution

We chose the cloud solution.

3. Training

We trained key users and administrators during the implementation and other users of the application additionally in comprehensive thematic blocks.

4. Testing

The client uses a test environment with real data, which allows new requirements and functions to be tested before deployment to the production environment.

The most used features:

• Resource management to match top-down and bottom-up planning
• WBS to structure projects
• Gantt puts tasks on a timeline and shows dependencies