utarel

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I’m the Founder and CEO of SoundCampaign. SoundCampaign is connecting artists with playlist curators allowing artists to make their songs more popular.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire utarel?

We hired utarel to help us establish better development and delivery processes and also to help us to tune JIRA for our business and project needs. Our main goal was to make delivery more predictable.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

We knew Yaroslav as a reliable person who has experience in project management, he recommended several updates to our processes and start using JIRA, and that sounded reasonable to us.

Describe the project in detail and walk through the stages of the project.

The scope was:

1. Improve Agile/Scrum processes - establish proper ceremonies, communication, estimations, requirements refinement and planning. Deliverables: process and ceremonies are established
2. Predictable delivery - establish roadmapping, planning and prioritization as well as managing changes and expectations. Deliverables: we had list of releases and what’s included in those releases
3. JIRA customization for our needs and processes. Deliverables: workflows for development, QA, customer support, product management and making all work streams working together in JIRA

How many resources from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

Just one person - Yaroslav, the founder of utarel, has been working with us directly.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

Yaroslav and utarel helped us to establish good Project Management processes - planning, requirements refinement, release management, delivery management, etc. They also helped us to move to JIRA and migrate all our tickets as well as to customize JIRA for our needs: workflow management, project boards customization, release management, notifications and permissions, different issue types and custom screens, automation, seamless experience and much more. All that helped us to boost our way of working on projects. I would highly recommend utarel’s services and consulting to anyone who is struggling with project management processes, tools customization or has issues with delivery.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

They are responsible, responsive and always try to understand “why’s” in order to help and establish the right processes. We used slack and emails for communication, and Yaroslav was responsive on daily basis.

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

They managed JIRA configuration with ease and customized it specifically for our needs

Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?

Everything was in accordance with our expectations.