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DASH4U
The DevOps Dashboard
Chaos because of T-shirt sizes in the scrum development?
With Dash4U there is a solution from project request to billing - fully automated.
There is basically no doubt that agile development is the best way to get a working product. The more uncertain the market environment, the faster the change loops in product manufacturing, the more the Scrum methodology can play out its strengths. When Jeff Sutherland first philosophized about Scrum in 1993 and put the basic understanding of agile development down on paper, no one thought about the technical and accounting integration of Scrum projects in companies.
DevOps - Modern mindset meets outdated processes
The pain in everyday life is quite noticeable. Not only in the Scrum teams themselves, but also when their world collides with accounting teams that have yet to adopt practices like innovation accounting. Where best practices indicate Scrum teams should not to go to the level of man-days and development expenses, many accounting teams still take the traditional view that one project is like the other. Preferably settled via a waterfall method of individual, previously fixed work packages and the corresponding order values. If, as is usual with product development, task definition and prioritization are changed based on continuous learnings and better understandings of reality, conflicts in accounting often occur. Which order value still fits the changed tasks? When is the feature of a product really billable and when does a partial acceptance make sense? And who still has an overview of whether the overall budget is sufficient for the remaining work on the project?
Dash4U - T-shirts for the developers
Teams can help themselves with the so-called T-shirt sizes. An attempt to assign the output of a Scrum team to a monetary billable size. It is defined in advance how many story points a T-Shirt of size S, M, L or XL has. These sizes in turn are assigned to fixed prices that can be billed in each framework agreement with suppliers. So far, so good. The problem: Each Scrum team defines for itself what output is hidden behind a story point. If in addition to that the tasks are changed from sprint to sprint via change request, this leads to constantly changing T-shirt sizes. The manual post-maintenance from the development result to the turnover is laborious, error-prone and hardly maintainable - especially in large projects, where this type of data maintenance via Excel and consorts quickly reaches its limits.
IN A NUTSHELL
- Scrum
- Large Scale Agile Framework
- Process Automation
- Project Management
- Atlassian Jira
- Python
- Docker Containervirtualization
Dash4U closes the gap between development and accounting
Reason enough for the experts at Cognizant Mobility to close this gap with their own software tool. The tool, which developers call "Dash4U", ensures end-to-end transparency from the initial inquiry to the order and development results, including billing in accounting.
For all those who want to know more about it: Dash4U uses the development statuses already stored in Jira and combines them with the agreed contract construct. The web-based tool has various remaining interfaces to be connected to any data source. In addition, no installation is required, since the necessary data is stored in a separate database and can thus be accessed from anywhere. Dash4U has a modern micro service architecture, which can be easily extended and scaled.
Dash4U - potential savings of over 150,000 Euro
From project references, significant savings potential in project administration can be demonstrated by Dash4U. From a recently completed project with an order volume of around 9 million Euros, more than 150,000 Euros could be saved in administrative activities. Mainly through the full automation of the process chain, instead of manual maintenance in Excel and Jira.
Once again, the advantages at a glance:
- Automated process from quotation to billing saves tedious maintenance
- Inconsistencies in the billing of large, distributed Scrum teams are fixed
- The performance of individual Scrum teams can be compared and optimized accordingly
- The Scrum team receives valuable KPIs to track their own status in the overall staffing process
Dash4U is currently being equipped with an SAP interface in order to be able to be integrated even more deeply into the day-to-day running of the company. Dash4U ultimately completes what started with Scrum in the 90s. Ultimately, an agility that can be experienced at all levels of the company, whose task is no less than to be able to get future projects off the ground even faster and, above all, more sustainably.
