Jira implementation for Nakamoto & Associates

Jira implementation for Nakamoto & Associates

Itransition provided Atlassian Jira Software consulting and training, helping the customer establish agile software development processes and streamline their business workflows.

Table of contents

Context

Our customer, Nakamoto & Associates, is a leading Tokyo-based consulting company, helping their clients effectively use Oracle Cloud. With a 20-year experience as an Oracle partner, the company specializes in enterprise systems and business process restructuring.

To better manage their outsourced tasks, improve performance, and increase processes visibility, the company was looking to establish agile software development processes by implementing Atlassian Jira Software. The product is known for being geared specifically towards collaborative software development and as an important component of Agile transformation.

The company chose Itransition for our proven status as an Atlassian Gold Solution Partner and experience in Atlassian consulting. It also helped that Itransition had been previously engaged on the company’s own projects. Therefore, they approached us for Jira implementation and training.

Solution

Process audit and Jira setup

Our team started with analyzing the customer’s project management processes and their major requirements regarding the improvements needed for managing their outsourced tasks and customer support.

To showcase how exactly Jira Software can address these requirements through its features and capabilities, our Atlassian consultants prepared a personalized product demo, thus helping the customer better understand how the solution would fit into their existing collaboration setup.

At the next stage, we carried out Jira implementation in the customer’s environment, leveraging AWS as the hosting solution.

User training

The next phase was to train the customer’s development teams to use their Jira tools most efficiently, leveraging the platform in their agile collaboration practices. For this task, we relied on our previous audit findings to prepare a set of materials describing Jira capabilities in detail and providing recommendations.

Recognizing the diversity of project roles in the customer’s teams, we broke the Jira user training into three role-specific modules, including:

  • Jira for admins. Within this training, we showed the customer’s team how to create and configure Jira projects, set up sprints, assign team members to roles, track employees’ performance, access Jira logs, and more. We also shared our best practices of troubleshooting and solving Jira users’ common issues effectively.
  • Jira for business users. The goal of this training module was to train the customer’s employees to use Jira in their daily tasks. These included guides and tips regarding the core Jira components, including projects, issues, dashboards, etc., as well as Jira navigation.
  • Jira for project managers. In the scope of this training, we covered the end-to-end project management flow, from starting a new Jira project to its finalization.Moreover, leveraging our experience in establishing our own agile software development processes, we described how to set up agile project management with Scrum/Kanban, create user stories and tasks in the backlog, manage boards (sprints, backlog, review, etc.), utilize reports to improve visibility into the project progress and team performance, etc.
Team Kanban board
Starting a sprint in Jira

For convenience as well as to minimize the training costs for the customer, our team delivered the training sessions via video conferencing from our London office, with the customer’s team connecting from their Tokyo headquarters. Each training was held on the customer’s Jira instance, lasted for two hours for a group of 3-4 participants, and was supported with relevant presentations.

At the end of each training, our Atlassian consultants would send follow-up emails, where we reiterated the answers and clarifications to the questions regarding Jira usage. To help the customer quickly access the information they might need, we also prepared the list of quick links to the Atlassian documentation with information on Jira permissions, user migration, project administration, and much more.

Results

Jira implementation by Itransition’s Atlassian consultants helped Nakamoto & Associates to significantly improve their project management practices, streamline business workflows, and increase visibility into their agile software development performance. The introduction of Jira Scrum/Kanban boards and reporting tools allowed their agile teams to effectively keep track of the progress by team member, project, and sprint. Our role-specific user training helped with Jira adoption at the early stages, so the customer’s employees could start using their new platform right away with a shallower learning curve.

We’ve been highly impressed by Itransition’s agile approach and established development processes. We appreciate everything that Itransition’s team contributed to our projects. Their team helped us incorporate agile software development practices, which significantly improved our daily workflows. They did not only help us out a lot, but also left much inspiration and stimulus to our staff.

Katsumi Matsyama

Katsumi Matsyama

President, Nakamoto & Associates