Centrally controlled project portfolio management at Wienerberger with Jira software and Teamworkx Cloud Hosted

The Wienerberger Group currently employs over 17,000 people and has 201 production sites in 30 countries. The headquarters are in Vienna, Austria. Founded 200 years ago and with a strong industrial base, Wienerberger has been consistently developing its own products and system solutions under ecological, social and economic aspects ever since. The company's focus is on ensuring uniform standards, but also on increasing productivity and reducing costs. This also includes the approach “Shift from Projects to Products”: tasks and projects should be presented “correctly” in a new form of collaboration, transparency should be created and processes should be standardized and mapped centrally. The latter is particularly important in relation to the overall context between portfolio, project and product owner.

What was needed was a tool that would allow the concept to be mapped transparently. The company was already working with Jira software, centrally in small teams. However, the tool had previously only been used in software development. This made coordination, planning and reporting more difficult. “The transformation can only work if, in addition to the organization and the processes, the right IT system is selected,” says Manfred Heger. Wienerberger decided to implement the project by making extended use of Jira software in combination with Confluence.
“The solution was discussed in detail. The requirements were high: the solution should work like a cloud system, but still be very flexible. An on-premises server was out of the question because Wienerberger could not and did not want to take over server maintenance due to a lack of resources. So the choice was between a public cloud and catworkx's hybrid solution. Since we didn't know what to expect from the product at the beginning, we ultimately decided on catworkx's hybrid variant: Teamworkx Cloud Hosted,” said Manfred Heger.

Teamworkx Cloud Hosted offers on-premises as a service. This means that the on-premises installation is hosted and operated by catworkx (including support, maintenance, etc.) and thus offers users the flexibility of a cloud environment. “By using this solution, we were able to significantly reduce the TCO (total cost of ownership) – simply by being able to outsource operations and risk. We now have a single point of contact for operations and for interacting with stakeholders,” says Heger.

The rollout initially took place at the demand and project planning levels (levels -> project and work package planning), then in the area of product development (levels -> planning of epics and stories). Over the course of the entire process, a lot of data was entered; the setup was continuously optimized by the end of 2019 through extensions and automations: e.g. the development of a complex system of rules to ensure data consistency in terms of workflow status and dependencies (all four dependency types Finish-Start, FF, SF, SS were considered) between processes. In February 2020, the system-related optimization was added by connecting the Teamworkx system to Wienerberger Azure AD (Active Directory) for user administration and SAML-based SSO.

Manfred Heger: „We are now on the way to implementing onboarding for 1,000 users in Jira and Confluence and I can say that we are very satisfied with the cooperation with the “Teamworkx team”.

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