The Challenge
Omnigon occupies a distinctive place among digital consulting firms; it conceptualizes designs, develops and delivers web-based software, responsive design websites and native mobile apps for the world’s most high-profile sports, media and entertainment companies. Omnigon’s approach is as unique as its niche; each product it delivers to clients involves multiple areas of the consultancy’s expertise. Different teams must work quickly, simultaneously and efficiently, and Omnigon’s relentless pursuit of customer satisfaction means every project must be a winner.
Omnigon continues to build its reputation on the work delivered for its clients, specifically those with hard deadlines and zero tolerance for delays. “We don’t have the luxury of moving dates. NASCAR is still going to race with or without our app; golfers will still tee off on the PGA Tour. Our clients don’t wait, so hitting deadlines is absolutely critical to our business,” says Roman Bediner, PMP and VP of Omnigon’s Service and Operations teams.
Omnigon recognized that to deliver projects on time and meet its high standards for quality, it needed a proven test management solution. During the first few in-depth discussions with Jama about work processes and challenges, Omnigon found what it was looking for: a way to link testing processes with business requirements and provide iterative quality assurance during development for shorter delivery cycles. The conversation then shifted from testing to traceability.
The Solution
For previous projects, Omnigon relied on various third-party tools. It was increasingly clear they weren’t quite enough to meet Omnigon’s needs for iterative improvements throughout the development life cycle. Omnigon sought in Jama a seamless, integrated platform that enabled continuous improvement and testing of products within its project management system.
In his role, Roman looks after quality assurance, support and DevOps. He was primarily interested in Jama’s quality assurance tool sets, given that the QA team is often working on multiple projects at any given time. Before signing on, he met with numerous senior-level colleagues across different business lines to review the platform. Everyone recognized the value and agreed Jama was the comprehensive solution for traceability it needed.
“The review and approval center has been instrumental for us.”Roman Bediner, PMP and VP of Service and Operations
The Results
“The review and approval center has been instrumental for us, giving our clients access to the requirements and the ability to approve or comment on them within the system. It’s relatively straightforward to get them up and running, and has also been a great tool for traceability and accountability. We are saving hours each week; our business analysts have gained 5-10 percent of their time back, allowing them to work on more projects and write more specs,” says Bediner.
Total Traceability. Omnigon knows many original requirements are covered by test cases and of those test cases, how much has been developed, is being developed and is being executed. Jama enables a complete connection of requirements to
development tickets and test cases.
Development KPIs. The company is now able to assign and analyze specific figures around development, whereas the previous process was very fractured and without useful data. Now Omnigon writes requirements in Jama as “living specs” and sees the downstream impact on quality assurance.
Requirements Review & Approval. Teams follow a collaborative process that starts with a high-level statement of work and branches out to the business analysts, who can begin working with the client and internal stakeholders and expand requirements as they become specs.
Test Execution. Jama has made it much easier for Omnigon’s QA engineers to test, visualize and understand what they need to accomplish.
Bona Fide Agility. As Roman sums it up, “Jama helps us specifically around our Agile approach. We’re writing code while requirements are still coming together. We’re deploying code and executing QA in a fast-moving cycle. Jama helps our business analysts get specs approved by our clients; then, with the project manager, they decompose those into individual tasks. Those individual tasks then sync with our JIRA instance and provide work for our development team. Similarly, once that spec gets approved, it then goes to QA to begin writing test cases for the particular spec—dozens to hundreds of specs.”
