Nexus Innovations moves from Waterfall to Agile with Forecast
Nexus Innovations offers custom software development services. Their specialties are web applications, microsites, web services / APIs, and improving collaboration platforms (SharePoint, Office365). It is important for them to keep the team together in a work environment tailored for productivity, creativity, teamwork and the diffusion of knowledge.
From Waterfall to Agile with Forecast
Nexus Innovations has well-defined needs for their work process. They want to know who’s working on what project and what’s going to be in their future pipeline. They are very reflective in their progress which enables their team to feel unified increase ownership and pride over their work. They want to know how the project went and if there were some problems with the project.
Nexus Innovations found Forecast to help them with achieving their company’s goals. Before Forecast, their tool only made it possible for them to use waterfall methodology. As Nexus Innovations works in Agile with sprint planning that solution was not a right fit for their needs. The estimating and time forecasting feature of Forecast was a significant benefit for their work process.
I think it’s a big market and you’re the only tool we could find to do that kind of estimating.
- Dominic, VP of Operation
Cornerstone value of Transparency brought to their work process
Forecast provides Nexus Innovations with visibility of the health of their projects. Dominic and his team built their own custom TV dashboard displayed on a big screen in the office. All their project reports are displayed on a big screen in their office, which gives visibility and transparency for all of the teams. Even if a team member is not working on a certain project, they still know how each project is progressing. Dominic explains, “We want to be very transparent about the progress of the projects, and that’s something we can do with the Forecast tool.” The dashboard also displays Scheduling to show the team how many allocations they have or if any new projects are coming up in the pipeline.
Easily follow your work and have visibility on all your projects.
- Dominic, VP of Operations
Everyone is made aware of the health of the projects, and are open for cross-team collaboration
Dominic describes the new implementation of displaying the dashboards and what value that has brought to their office. “When we started displaying the dashboards on the TV, people were really happy about it. What I have seen is that people want to add in information about how their project is going and they started talking about the progress of different projects even if they were not assigned to it,” Dominic, VP of Operations. For Nexus Innovations, displaying their project dashboards on the office TV’s have served to be really useful for them. It has generated more discussions in the team and between teams.
Time tracking enabling team and project utilization
Dominic shares that Forecast was able to allow Nexus Innovations to refine their work process with the growth of their projects. With Forecast, it’s effortless for them to manage their time and to manage their timesheets. One feature Nexus Innovations uses for their work process is time tracking. They were interested in initiating time management to increase accountability within the company on a project level.
Company-wide, each team member uses Forecast to register their time. With time registrations they like that they can see all their logged hours in a Month view. For managers, their ability to see if all their team has entered their time correctly allows them to track the progress of the project accurately. If everyone has registered their time, the budget, time estimations, and project status are more precisely reflective.
We can easily export all our timesheet information for billing which is saving us a lot of time.
- Dominic, VP of Operations
A high-level overview leads to healthy projects
By utilizing a project management tool like Forecast, Nexus Innovations was able to implement a new work process to keep their projects running smoothly. Internally, on a weekly basis, the agile portfolio managers get to review the current status of all projects together. They use Forecast to see the overall health and quality of the projects, which allows them to stay ahead of their project deadlines. When Nexus Innovations uses Forecast for forecasting, i.e., estimating their project and following the progress is much easier than it was before.
The adoption rate of using Forecast was simple for Nexus Innovations. “When we have a new team member added to the tool, it’s really easy to integrate them. Our team members like to use the tool, so we don’t have to spend a lot of time getting them on board,” says Dominic
It didn’t take long before these new work processes were implemented at Nexus Innovations. Their business goals of estimating, time tracking, and monitoring the health of the projects have been fulfilled. Overall, Dominic is satisfied with the increase in internal visibility and transparency company-wide.
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