How Jellyfish Scenario Planner is helping CHG Healthcare to a potential $1.5m in savings

Background

CHG Healthcare’s engineering organization is composed of multiple teams working on both internal and customer facing products. These products span a variety of technology initiatives centered around desktop and mobile applications, as well as internal processes.

Adam Odell, Director of Program Management, joined the team four years ago to support their digital transformation efforts and establish their project & program management practice. Since Odell came on board, the engineering team has nearly quadrupled in size, representing CHG Healthcare’s commitment to technology investment.

The Challenge: Time consuming manual data processing

Reporting on data pulled from both Jira and Github was a time consuming process for the CHG team; it took twenty people roughly four hours every week to parse. It was a huge commitment to collect, analyze and visualize this highly technical data – with mixed results.

The CHG team sought a solution that would enable them to eliminate the burden of this manual process and that would empower them to make proactive, data-driven decisions. They evaluated multiple engineering management platforms, such as Pluralsight Flow, but ultimately settled on Jellyfish. 

Using Jellyfish’s Scenario Planner

As a PMO Leader, a large part of Odell’s job is to maintain control of the parameters required to successfully execute a project – scope, schedule & budget. One Jellyfish feature stood out to Odell as particularly helpful in this regard: Scenario Planner.

Scenario Planner provides insight and contextual data for managing engineering resources across in-flight deliverables. It allows users to model different scenarios to understand the potential impact of modifying the number engineers of a project, how much of their attention is spent on a project, and the scope of the project itself. It’s a tool designed to enable data-driven trade off decisions to accelerate the delivery timelines of high priority deliverables – and for Odell, it was a game changer.

“As the teams are executing their sprints, it provides us with a real time view as to how we’re progressing against our target delivery dates,” Odell shared.

He provided an example: “The team recently encountered an unanticipated complexity in a service we’re developing. By using Scenario Planner we were able to proactively course correct much faster than in similar situations we’ve experienced previously – we’re talking a week or two into development as opposed to a month”.

Odell added “Scenario Planner created an opportunity for us to have plenty of dialogue, with both engineering and executive leadership, in order to talk through how we can pivot and ensure we’re still delivering on time.”

In this single scenario, Odell calculated a $130,000 saving via proactively re-distributing resources to avoid project-cost overrun. He added that it wasn’t inconceivable that an enterprise business of CHG Healthcare’s size could save around $1.5m annually across all of engineering in similar scenarios. 

When asked if he’d ever used a similar tool in his career, Odell responded “No other tool pulls together every aspect of the development process to create projections of this quality. There’s nothing close on the market, nothing nearly as effective or accurate.” 

Results

Using Jellyfish has uncovered the exact insights the CHG team required to understand what’s happening in their organization, empowering them to be more focused and efficient.  “We’re a data-driven organization now,” Odell said. “We’re communicating effectively with engineering leadership more than ever before thanks to Jellyfish.”

The CHG team has integrated Jellyfish into weekly readouts with their executive team, discussing prioritization, measurements around velocity, allocations distribution, and much more. “Actually understanding what people are working on and whether or not it is aligned to what we’ve committed to is huge. At least once a week we pop into the Teams dashboard and look at Allocations,” Odell said. “Jellyfish has made our processes so seamless, easy, and user friendly.”

Odell says he’s taken back roughly four hours every Friday afternoon that he used to spend on reporting, and further estimates that CHG Program Management has seen a 75% reduction in overall time spent manually reporting.

What’s Next

The CHG team plans to further integrate Jellyfish into their decision making processes with a greater focus on high value initiatives. The team will also hone in on Work In Progress and identify friction points to reduce idle work. CHG Healthcare looks forward to continuing their strong partnership with the Jellyfish team.