Increasing Project Management Efficiency

To begin with, our customer wanted to optimize their way of working for their project management, therefore we did a project in Jira for them. Jira software aims to track issues to obtain agile project management. However, due to unique workflows and misuse of Jira, keeping an overview of the complete process becomes complicated. Therefore, Apolix built a customized process mining solution based on three pillars: conformance, data quality, and project management. The solution created resulted not only in generating full process transparency over the project management in the entire organization, but also dashboards indicating process deviations in real-time and automated reports sent out on a continuous basis to monitor the improvements.

Intro

Jira Software is an issue-tracking tool created by Atlassian that enables agile project management. The main feature is to work in sprints with the scrum methodology, while other important features include the ability to track issues, a customizable user interface, and ease of use. Project management is important for every company since it brings leadership and direction to projects, which enables team members to deliver their best performance.

On top of that, good project management saves time and money, improves internal communication, and improves workflow, leading to smoother processes. Assuring a high project success rate and understanding the root causes for non-conforming projects allows for process transparency, and that’s where Process Mining comes in!

Executive Dashboard

(All data is anonymized and randomized)

Challenges

First, because each project is complex and has a unique workflow, common problems arise with project management using Jira. Every department has different tasks and requirements and will have therefore different process flows. For some departments, it may be necessary to review issues by one or multiple team members, while other departments may not need to review issues at all. The complexity arises in the fact to generate insights from all these different departments and projects.
Another challenge relates to the misuse of Jira. Projects are created but not managed properly. To illustrate this, issues had no assignee, no proper description, or no due date. These fields are important to know who is accountable, know what must be done, and know when the deadline is. Without these fields, getting a complete and clear overview of the project is difficult, making it challenging to precisely assess the effectiveness of various projects and teams.

An additional challenge in the use of Jira is the lack of project management, which leads to a decrease in efficiency. Improper data cleaning, unclear objectives, and lack of resources are all a result of poor project management. This can affect the company’s budget, employee turnover, and overall profit.

To tackle these challenges and turn them into opportunities, we built a customized process mining solution. The main goal is to understand all the different processes that exist across all departments. In addition, decreasing cycle times of projects and meeting desired deadlines are given priority to increase overall project management efficiency. The last goal aims to identify the deviation that was causing the conformance rate to drop and give our customer guidance to find a starting point to increase the number of conforming processes.

Solutions

The solution that Apolix built for the customer was based on three pillars: conformance, data cleaning, and project management. Based on these objectives, we analyzed the duration of each problem in each workflow stage to understand where tickets slow down and potentially become ghost tickets. However, the root causes are often unknown for this, making improvement initiatives challenging.

Ghost Tickets Dashboard

(All data is anonymized and randomized)

The conformance dashboard allows for monitoring whether issues follow the optimal workflow within a department. This optimal workflow can differ per department but has a general structure that consists of the following steps: create issue – assign issue – add description – in progress – done. There are several causes why issues are not following this optimal workflow, such as a description change, reassignment, or ping pong between team members. The conformance dashboard shows several KPIs, such as the compliance rate and the average cycle time, which can be used for monitoring. Besides this, we analyzed the issues per issue type to give a deep dive into the several types.

Process Compliance Dashboard 

(All data is anonymized and randomized)

Data cleaning was crucial for better process quality. A consequence of improper data cleaning is ghost tickets, which are tickets that are untouched for more than 100 days, meaning no one is working on these tickets. This causes deviations in the overall deliverables of the projects. We enabled them to get insights into their ghost tickets by allowing them to filter on the issue type within the ghost tickets. Next to this, we built a customized automation that reports daily on (potential) ghost tickets.

Finally, we focused on overall project management and transparency within the processes. Our client was surprised by how many variants their process has. By providing insights into the process flow and its variants, transparency was improved, which led to higher project management performance.

Reassignment Analysis

(All data is anonymized and randomized)

Outcomes

It became evident that we gave our customer new insights when we discussed the project’s results. Process mining has shown the company its great potential to expand horizontally in the organization. As a result, the company has decided to add process mining to their long-term strategic goals to create and maintain transparency.

Do you believe that you are not maximizing the ROI you can get out of your information system? As Process Mining specialists, we can help you uncover the truth in your system.