As a leading software solutions and managed services provider, Credencys needed to find a better way to track and manage development for their extensive and constantly growing customer base.

As an expert in the software industry, Sagar Sharma, Credencys’s CTO, was extremely familiar with the challenges related to ever-changing market demands.

“Software development is unpredictable, and the job of the software development organization is to put a model in place that manages critical risk as strongly as possible.”

Credency’s software solutions and IT managed service business were growing rapidly. Like many software development organizations, the team was constantly tasked with innovating to meet customer expectations while also supporting new customers. As the CTO of Credencys, Sagar had to cope with the challenges of serving a new customer base while still meeting the needs of an existing customer base with existing resources. He soon recognized the need to adopt best development practices that could provide his team with more accurate visibility into their resource availability, work, and release forecasts while mitigating the risks that come from a misalignment between the developer’s understanding and the customer’s expectations.

Another common challenge Sagar had to manage was Credency’s geographically distributed development teams, which spanned across the United States, Singapore, and India. The company’s distributed environment meant that 30–40% of their projects were spread across four development centers, some with a time difference of more than ten hours. “Not only did we have to struggle with the geographic challenges, we also had to find a way to manage technical improvements like continuous integration, automated testing, and auto deployment across all projects and locales,” said Sagar.

With a complex team and development structure, Credency needed to maintain a high level of collaboration and communication across functions and locations to ensure success. Sagar wanted to get the developers and all contributors on board with transitioning to agile processes for better efficiencies and communication. He also wanted to help teams understand that these iterative methods played a significant role in risk management and early predictability, rather than looking at them as change for change’s sake (as a process).

“It’s about identifying predictability so that the company doesn’t lose millions and reputation with customers on a partially developed deployment,” said Sagar.

• Improved collaboration between software delivery and the business units
• The defect count was reduced by 40%.
• Improved product management visibility
• Improved time to market for product delivery
• Turnaround time for resolving critical defects was reduced by 50%.
• Transparency of all feature requests (stories and defects) and deliverables within one tool
• Enhanced tracking of key metrics
• Greater visibility into progress
• Real-time visibility into project status for all stakeholders and team members

Once Sagar realized that agile might solve his organization’s key challenges, he began his search for an agile project management tool to support his agile processes. After trying several open-source tools, Sagar was unconvinced by the lack of functionality and usability they provided, and he was also worried about the security of sensitive data. This experience inspired him to evaluate commercially well-known tools, one of which was Quickscrum. A few famous competitor tools of Quickscrum were evaluated for almost five months. It became so superficial that it did not meet the demands for customization and support for various functions within the organization. Next, they started evaluating Quickscrum, were impressed with the approach of Quickscrum, Started with Agile training at an Indian development center, and were coached for 2 months to implement the right way of Agile. They quickly realized that only Quickscrum could meet all of their needs, so they made the decision to move to Quickscrum.”

After successfully implementing Quickscrum and bringing in an agile coach to run the teams through a full release cycle, Sagar was charmed by the results: an expressively improved operating model and an agile management platform that delivered visibility into release forecasting while identifying misalignments between developers’s understanding and customers expectations. Sagar added,

“Managing our iterative development approach within Quickscrum provided us the foundation to assess and review whether what we were delivering met the customer’s expectations.” Moreover, he increased clarity in the definition of features through backlog management and was able to create a foundation to measure his software development operation while managing risk more effectively. “We were able to keep eyes on our key metrics using Quickscrum and course-correct early on,” said Sagar. Within six months, Credency had standardized on Quickscrum. Sagar was thrilled by the extraordinary usability of Quickscrum, saying, “The user experience of the Quickscrum solution was impressive. The support from the Quickscrum team made it easy to roll out Quickscrum across the entire organization.”

Credencys has more than 200 people spread across 25 teams in four development centers across the globe, including Design, architecture, Development, R&D, analysis, testing, and QA. After implementing Quickscrum, Credency’s development team was able to streamline operations and effectively align customers expectations with implementation and delivery. Using Quickscrum, Credencys’ customers can now track development progress through the dashboard, more accurately forecast releases, and better manage risk to improve overall time to market for product deliveries.

“Enabling significant improvement in our software delivery was of the utmost importance.” Quickscrum has given us the ability to turn on a dime and quickly react to both market and customer needs,” said Sagar.

“Many companies fail when transitioning from product vision into real execution and delivery. Quickscrum helped us visualize our customers’ product vision for effective guidance and build a unified process to manage the backlog. This was “silver bullet” in keeping our organization aligned and focused on top customer and market priorities,” said Sagar.