Managed Objects

Challenge

Improve quality and efficiency of product delivery

Solution

Serena TeamTrack

Results

• Improved issue tracking with automatic measurement and reporting
• Improved communication and distribution of information
• Improved visibility with ability to query for issues across applications and platforms
• Simplified, intuitive requirements management
• Reduced costs and shortened development cycle

“Our Formula® business is about helping companies deliver better service to their customers. So we understand the importance of keeping our own customers satisfied and Serena TeamTrack is a critical part of that mission.”
- Joseph Monteil, Vice President,Research and Development, Managed Objects

Insight into internal processes helps maximize development efficiency, product quality, and customer satisfaction

The survival of an enterprise today depends on its technology infrastructure. Everything, from e-mail to critical customer transactions, relies on a multitude of systems, software, and networks. And, promises of productivity improvements, operating efficiencies, customer satisfaction gains, competitive advantages, and other business enhancements continue to drive technology investment over time.

What is missing for many enterprises, however, is a clear picture of how their technology infrastructure directly affects the bottom line of their business. Managed Objects provides this information with a unique Business Service Management software platform called Formula.

Widespread adoption of Formula has made Managed Objects a market leader. Naturally, this success has created new customer demands and internal directives that have accelerated the company’s need to develop new product features. To meet these accelerated schedules, Managed Objects turned to Serena TeamTrack to manage their development processes.

Delivering quality software updates to customers faster than ever before

Joseph Monteil, Managed Objects’ Vice President of Research and Development, aims to continuously improve the quality and efficiency of delivering Formula to their customers.

To achieve this objective, he depends on knowing exactly how customer requests—both enhancements and defects—are being processed internally. He asked David S. Lee, Director of Engineering Operations, to find a solution that could best support the company’s growth.

“We were growing quite rapidly, and we needed to find a new solution for managing development issues and tracking customer incidents—one with the tools and the scalability to effectively address our customer's needs and our internal requirements,” said Lee.

With customers around the world and a heavy volume of data to manage, Lee set his sights on a web-architected defect tracking and workflow solution that supported a highly scalable back-end database. After evaluating several prospective solutions, he selected TeamTrack.

TeamTrack is the first process-centric request management solution to provide true workflow capabilities. Its web architecture enables it to be used with Managed Objects’ existing version control and testing tools to improve communication and accountability across its entire development chain.

According to Monteil, “It was important for us to integrate customer enhancement requests into Formula’s product life cycle. That way, all of our customers could quickly benefit from the work we do for even one customer. That’s what TeamTrack is all about. It enables us to tie customer needs to product development in real time.”

Integrating easily with existing processes

In just 45 days, Managed Objects built workflows and tables, migrated data, added users, set up administration and tested TeamTrack.

“We were very pleased with how quickly and easily the system could be implemented,” commented Lee. “Our number one goal was to roll out a new system with minimal changes to our existing culture. I think we met our goal with great success—our people were quickly trained and are using the many features of the system with ease.”

Supporting a global organization

The web-architectured nature of TeamTrack allows Managed Objects to support a distributed organization and customer base. Their support and engineering teams are in Virginia, but its sales and technical account managers may be anywhere in the world. “They share information with the engineering and quality assurance teams back at headquarters so we can properly diagnose and reproduce problems seen at customer sites and, thus, take action more quickly,” explained Monteil.

Web-based access provides customers with immediate insight into the status of incidents they have logged, as well as 24 x 7 access to the Managed Objects knowledge base for answers to common questions. It also makes it simple to remotely administer TeamTrack.

Tracking every detail

TeamTrack provides Managed Objects the broad range of capabilities it needs, including notification, escalations, technology-enforced workflow, personalized home pages, and extensive reporting. Managed Objects takes advantage of dozens of reports, including resource utilization, quality verification and validation, customer configurations and integration points, release scheduling, issue trends, cycle time reductions, and more.

“We use the reporting features for defect classifications and root cause analysis," said Lee. "This enables us to improve our development process by making it simpler to catch any defects before they make their way into our product. That’s vital to maintaining high quality and, ultimately, for ensuring the satisfaction of our customers.”

Managed Objects is a company clearly focused on the long-term satisfaction of their customers. “TeamTrack really enhances our support offerings to our customers,” concluded Monteil. “By implementing TeamTrack, we’re making a clear statement that Managed Objects is committed to ensuring our customers’ complete satisfaction by tracking the critical details of our development and support processes. And that's a major factor in our long-term success.”