Project Management Tool Jira for Hamburger Hochbahn

The Hamburger Hochbahn AG controls the development of its new mobility platform "Switchh" via the Atlassian project management tool Jira – introduced, administered and hosted by the TIMETOACT GROUP.

In the future, anyone wanting to get from A to B in Hamburg will no longer have to make the effort to get a physical ticket. It will be possible, to not only take subway or bus but also other mobility services such as MOIA, car2go, e-scooters, and so on. The concept for multimodality is called Switchh. HOCHBAHN is also working on an innovative ticketing function called "Check-In/Be-Out" (CIBO). In the future, customers will be able to check in to use public transportation with just one click; at the end of the day, the cheapest fare for the customer will be determined and billed. Both innovations, Switchh and CIBO, are based on the HOCHBAHN mobility platform and will be integrated as functions in an app in the future. This puts Hamburger Hochbahn AG at the forefront of modern public transport services in Germany.

The basis of the app is a complex software platform, developed by a 30-person team, internal and external experts from IT, sales, traffic planning, billing and other areas. They need a professional project management tool to coordinate their work. Hamburger Hochbahn AG opted for Jira from Atlassian for this purpose. The software maps complex workflows and provides teams with flexible planning options in an intuitive user interface. Performance within the development project can be precisely analyzed using visual real-time data and increased accordingly.

"We were looking for a tool that we could use as an on-premises solution as a service without having to worry about infrastructure and operation of the application," explains Sebastian Heyna, IT architect at Hamburger Hochbahn AG. The transport company itself does not have its own data center and therefore works with hosting partners. In the first phase, Jira was used as a Cloud solution. However, it soon became clear that the software would be used throughout the entire company. Hamburger Hochbahn AG therefore switched to an on-premises architecture and now operates the system in the TIMETOACT GROUP data center on its own servers. Hamburger Hochbahn AG already has a long-standing partnership with the IT consulting firm; among other things, the e-mail infrastructure is operated by TIMETOACT GROUP.

Through a managed service contract, TIMETOACT GROUP provides the company with hosting of the solution, licensing, support, consulting and software customizing from a single source. Sebastian Heyna: "This allows us to focus completely on our tasks and use the tool in all its diversity without having to worry about infrastructure or operation. This results in more freedom for the actual project work." Switchh development teams can stringently execute workflows in the software and document the different statuses of tasks (open, in progress, closed). An operation is a requirement that describes a dedicated use case: "Customer A wants to buy a ticket for the Hamburg public transport system to travel from B to C." The development team then derives tasks and requirements from this: What changes need to be made to the source code of the mobility platform to enable the transaction?

The complete requirements management is mapped in the software according to this principle. Ideas for requirements are recorded and refined further and further in so-called refinement meetings. In the end, a Jira ticket contains all acceptance criteria for a dedicated task; external graphics can also be integrated through a connection via Confluence, Atlassian's collaboration platform. All monitoring and tracking of the individual development steps from the initial idea to the production deployment of a function in the app takes place in the project management tool. The requirements are then forwarded to the various development areas in Jira: App and backend developers, quality assurance, testing, etc. This leads to high quality in the project – work is easier to track and is completed faster and with higher quality.

Jira provides teams with flexible planning options that go ideally with the project: Scrum, Kanban or a mixed methodology. Hamburger Hochbahn AG makes the status of individual development steps visible via a Kanban board, supplemented by a reporting system that provides information on the status of version delivery. 6,559 processes are now stored in Jira. Switchh was the first development project for which Jira was used. In the meantime, the software has long since been used for projects outside of IT – in a total of approx. 20 application scenarios by more than 220 people, including not only employees of Hamburger Hochbahn AG, but also many external parties. For example, there are major projects in sales that use Jira to establish modern sales channels such as check-in/be-out. In human resources, the focus is on developing new interfaces for the HR applications. Hamburger Hochbahn AG is also coordinating the complete overhaul of its Data Warehouse structures using Atlassian software.

"Our relationship with TIMETOACT GROUP is very good," reports Sebastian Heyna, "the response speed is very high, most inquiries are answered within 24 hours. Even with short-term, complex requests for the administration of Jira, we receive support very quickly." The expertise from a single source – infrastructure, operation, consulting and licenses – and the end-to-end support provided in this way relieve the transport service provider's IT department and project management and increase efficiency in day-to-day work. Sebastian Heyna also likes the fact that he does not have to face a call center agent when making inquiries. "We have direct contacts who know the specifics of our configuration. This way, you don't have to start from scratch every time." At TIMETOACT, the name says it all; the company tackles challenges and works continuously on improvements. Hamburger Hochbahn AG has been making this experience for many years now and has thus found the ideal partner to provide it with reliable, high-quality IT services from a single source.