How a multinational marketing company has been implementing Jira apps such as Projectrak and others

Grouping campaign information to distribute it to Campaign Program Managers

Jira's first focus is on software development, naturally, basing the work around tasks rather than projects. However, the considerable advantage of this tool is that it can be adapted to work across many ways and industries.

As software development has the recurrent task of watching bugs, Jira intends to primarily open bug tickets containing information about it (this is the issue or task), with additional data like versions, fixed versions, and allowing to group those bug fixes into releases. And basically, that was everything Jira does.

Jira didn't have a way to group campaign-based information logically as the one UHUB needed

Jira's tasks focus has difficulty grouping, processing, and delivering groups of work for the ways agencies work. Agencies works are distributed from a macro perspective: project/campaign based. By default, the information contained there must be attached to tasks, which applied to a standard context of Jira, it results in errors, data duplication, and data bloating.

Picture this: Different Creative Directors are working on a big project for a large clothing manufacturer. This project is destined to be placed into a wide range of markets, which among other actions, it requires translations, product teams, and all sorts of placements for different channels. The teams working on this project will align around standard metadata such as image standards, like applying CMYK to a particular picture, creating dynamic assets, and other standard variables assigned to different global teams. This information needs to be tracked by the Campaign Program Managers, and the Projectrak Layouts allows it.

The solution...

Projectrak is key during the campaign creation process

When any team member joins a campaign, refers directly to Projectrak's Layouts information, which is the main center of knowledge, displaying information about the campaign, providing enough data to get their hands onto the collaboration process.

As new deliverables keep arriving from those clients with high volumes of work, Projectrak allows Project Managers to upload further information accurately for ongoing campaigns into the corresponding workspaces, displaying an updated visualization of the campaign in Jira containing the requirements specified on the client's brief.

What's a Workspace for UHUB? A workspace is what UHUB has internally defined as a Jira project, a Confluence space, a Bitbucket project, an Opsgenie team, and a Status page.

Interacting with other business areas for campaign success

Besides serving as a project central and a source of campaign information, based on the primary source of knowledge, the Program Campaign Managers and their representation in software, Projectrak for Jira, and the project data from its Layouts. It provides different backstage dynamics, mainly by feeding it with information from other organization areas.

Introducing a timesheeting system with data extracted from Finance, HR, or Resourcing, this metadata is leveraged into the campaign information we already have, providing:

•    To the Agency, the information about the work resources they will need to work in the campaign, allowing them to invest appropriately in the resourcing and stakeholders' skill set required for the campaign.
•    To Planners oversee the overall campaign statuses, e.g., those placed in 27 markets, the amount of worked hours, the staff needed, from which areas, etc...
•    To Creatives to organize and forecast their work based on accurate planning.

This workflow occurs without support, centralizing and creating as many projects as required, as needed, from small to very large campaigns.

Projectrak allows a shift in paradigm for Jira, which has resulted in handy for management using project-based data in Jira.

Most of the time, this situation ends with happy customers.

Going beyond Jira:

To keep the whole process running tight and seamlessly, the Campaign Program Managers have special needs on specific campaigns other Atlassian products fulfill; in those situations, going beyond Jira has been needed using:

•    Confluence: To describe, document, and/or further explain the work occurring in Jira or the campaign.
•    Bitbucket: It's used when there's the need to save the information about website repositories that belong to a campaign.
•    Bamboo: A Bamboo plan is needed when developing a dynamic website and it's using a Bitbucket repository.

Which benefits does Projectrak report?

•    Better productivity by eliminating bottlenecks for the IT/Support Team and providing a smoother campaign flow production; this is possible by allowing Program Campaign Managers to create workspaces directly, as they need it.
•    Time-saving actions and better information resourcing. The automation actions (in this case, automated with ScriptRunner) allow extracting additional information from other systems to Projectrak's projects/campaigns into Jira, enhancing each campaign request information and allowing better resourcing and visibility, providing quality forecasting and planning.
•    Remote friendly. This system allows an integrated and centralized place to go where to place the essential knowledge to kickstart different campaigns.
•    Native project reporting. Once the data is rolling on this system, it is possible to get that information out by using Projectrak's native possibility to create Dashboards for projects in Jira, based on five different gadgets this app provides. It's possible to generate specific reports at the project level as health status, project sizes, statistical information, and more, getting a sizeable holistic view of work getting done.
•    Democratization of data-driven decisions. From the creative teams to the Finances team, they all benefit from the built-in reports Projectrak gadgets embed into Jira Dashboards. As reports are central for executives and day-to-day line managers, they benefit from seeing individual health statuses of projects/campaigns, or the financial team overviewing billing codes, and from which system of them it's linked.
•    Work visualization. Every team member from any area can oversee all the work done in any piece of business (creative item or campaign) goes through. Keeping this information in one spot will make it available for every team to visualize at any time by reporting the app's different views.

The future...

What's next for UHUB?

UHUB is always looking to improve its systems. After rolling out any system to production, there's the imperative drive to improve it further. In the case explained here, they have detected with user feedback help that they should focus on templating features.

Currently, they're exploring a way that allows the Campaign Program Manager to facilitate the creation of deliverables they've done in the past, which Project Managers frequently ask. They're evaluating resourcing systems, team-based systems, or even a test management suite. Demonstrating that way, UHUB is a team of passionate Atlassian experts dedicated to improving WPP's processes and helping their teams to succeed at work through software.