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 of 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.”

Credencys software solutions and IT managed service business was growing rapidly. Like many software development organizations, the team was constantly tasked with innovating to meet customer expectations while supporting new customers as well. As the CTO of Credencys, Sagar had to cope with the challenges of serving new customers base while still meeting the need 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, release forecasts, while mitigating the risks that come from a misalignment between developer’s understanding and customer’s expectation.

Another common challenge Sagar had to manage was Credencys’ 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 centres – 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 with and locales,” said Sagar.

With a complex team and development structure, Credencys 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 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
•  Defect count reduce by 40 %
•  Improved product management visibility
•  Improved time to market for product delivery
•  Turnaround time for resolving critical defects 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 also he was worried about security of sensitive data. This experience exited him to evaluate commercially well-known tools – one of which was Quickscrum. Few famous competitor tools of Quickscrum, they evaluated for almost five months. It became superficial that it did not meet the demands, customization and support for various functions within organization. Next, they started evaluating Quickscrum, impressed with approach of Quickscrum, Started with Agile training at Indian development centre, Coached for 2 month 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 agile management platform that delivered visibility into release forecasting while identifying misalignment between developers’s understanding and customer’s expectation. 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 expectation.” Moreover, he increased clarity in 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 Credencys had standardized on Quickscrum. Sagar was thrilled by the extra ordinary usability of Quickscrum, saying, “The user experience of Quickscrum solution was impressive. The support from 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 centres across the globe – including Design, architect, Development, R&D, Analysis Testing and QA. After implementing to Quickscrum, Credencys’ development team were able to streamline operations and effectively align customer’s expectation 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 utmost. 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 to 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.