How Jellyfish helped Keller Williams Realty improve data accuracy by 20%

Background

Keller Williams uses Jellyfish to optimize their business processes and Jira hygiene. For many software development teams, Jira is essential for tracking issues and projects, which means it is central to engineering operations. But lack of Jira hygiene is a common problem that plagues engineering organizations of all sizes, especially as they scale. Using Jellyfish to add thoughtful structure and organization within your Jira instance goes a long way in improving overall operations.

Using Jellyfish for Jira hygiene

Soon after implementing Jellyfish, the Keller Williams senior leadership started asking questions about the data they were seeing. They were curious about investment distributions and why time was being spent on Non-Epic work. Previously, KW had no guidelines on linking Epics and how to handle certain things within Jira. Jellyfish prompted the team to clean up their Jira hygiene.

The team identified a list of Jira issues via category and talked with Engineering and Product Managers to understand what wasn’t properly linked. “After having those conversations I was able to identify the next steps which were to work with Product and the managers to try to clean up the Epics that were not properly linked and to get guidelines in place for tracking Epics in Jira,” Rebecca Lewis, Agile Coach at Keller Williams, said. “We then took it a step further and added a new field to our Jira instance – “Type of Epic Work” – for our Epics in Jira with the option of either Maintenance or Feature.”

The team made this new field required in Jira so that all new Epics created from that point forward would have this data available. This had an immediate impact on their ability to calculate capitalizable vs. non-capitalizable work, dramatically improving data accuracy for auditing. Since using Jellyfish the Keller Williams team has improved their data accuracy by 20%.

Keller Williams recommends a few different screens in Jellyfish for cleaning up Jira:

• Investment Allocations
• Current Sprint Progress
• Deliverables In-Progress
• Team Hierarchy

Rebecca also recommends cross-checking sprints in Jira and Jellyfish. “If you see a large variation in the number of issues that are considered ‘done’ I would recommend checking that your Jira issues have a resolution/resolution date,’” she shared.

Automating workflows + classifying epics

Jellyfish has helped Keller Williams automate their Jira workflows, making what was once manual work much more efficient. Epics are also much easier classified in Jira since using Jellyfish. Previously there was uncertainty around type of work, and now with Jellyfish the team is able to easily differentiate type of work.

Adding structure to their Jira instance has greatly improved overall operations. The Keller Williams teams follows best practices and uses Jellyfish to create cohesion across teams.

Enabling Jellyfish internally

Rebecca does a stellar job at socializing Jellyfish updates internally and driving product adoption. She shares Jellyfish user reports with managers as motivation, circulates new feature announcements, and encourages all team members to sign up for product alerts.

What’s next for Keller Williams

The Keller Williams team will be leveraging Jellyfish’s New Metrics Experience to track improvement using comparison events. “Previously we were tracking this manually in Excel over time. I love that I can select the metrics that show for each team by default for my own view so that I can focus on the ones I care about specifically for that team and the areas they are trying to improve,” Rebecca shared.

The team will also focus on mapping Jira hygiene to larger company initiatives and business outcomes, using Jellyfish to help guide them and continuously align with leadership needs.