The Scenario
FAME continuously develops and upgrades its student information systems. The ability to incorporate issues raised by customers in new releases and upgrades is vital to ensure FAME’s solutions continue to meet customer demands.
- Two separated teams at FAME – Development team and Support team
- Rally system is used to manage agile development activities
- Zendesk is used for support activities
- Development team works on defects in CA Agile
- Support team works on tickets in Zendesk
The Business Problem
The support team had to manually request that feedback was incorporated into development plans, and frequently request status updates to pass on to customers. “Our manual process was not only inefficient but also made it difficult to provide clear and regular updates to customers on the status of their issue,” comments Alfaro.
- Support team was unable to see changes being made by development
- Difficulty for support team to provide feedback and reporting to development
- Lack of communication and poor end-to-end visibility
The OpsHub Solution
The OpsHub Integration Manager (OIM) unified the two systems by connecting Rally and Zendesk.
FAME achieved bi-directional synchronization of defects and tickets between CA Agile and Zendesk:
- New ticket entered into Zendesk syncs as a defect in Rally and becomes visible to the development team
- When development team fixes a defect and updates it, the new changes appear immediately in Zendesk ticket
Outcomes
- Integration of Rally with Zendesk has provided FAME with streamlined and automated processes across the two core IT teams
- Customer issues can be addressed more quickly and efficiently in Rally while customers are kept fully informed via Zendesk
- Integrating Rally with Zendesk has also enabled FAME to:
- Increase efficiency and optimize development resources
- Improve staff satisfaction and cross-team collaboration
- Enhance customer service through clear, proactive communication
Benefits
OIM implementation integrated FAME’s disparate ALM systems seamlessly. OpsHub allowed the development and support teams to each continue using their preferred ALM tools and still improve the speed and efficiency of communication.
Enhanced visibility and traceability gave team members more information and richer context. It enabled them to make better decisions faster. Collaboration has improved with increasing team productivity.
Integration also has improved reporting for FAME, which can now leverage data across both systems.
“We now get a wealth of information that helps us really understand the issues being raised by customers, such as the number of defects by release and escalations by module,”– Ricky Alfaro, Director of Product Management and Implementations at FAME.