How Precisely uses Jellyfish to track investments and improve sprint predictability

Creating a deeper understanding of investments

Confident business decisions require trustworthy data. Precisely helps organizations manage accurate, consistent, and contextual data to drive successful AI, automation, and other critical business initiatives. With Precisely’s market-leading capabilities, it’s quicker and easier for businesses to establish data integrity and create solutions to modern-day challenges.

Precisely recently transitioned from traditional legacy software to a new SaaS application, creating a need for investment tracking. “In the past, our engineering teams dedicated around 80% of their time to maintenance and 20% to new features,” explained Tyler Even, Vice President of R&D at Precisely. “In the last three years, we’ve tried to flip that.” With the majority of Precisely’s engineering resources now driving product development, they needed a deeper understanding of their investments. 

Before Jellyfish, Precisely relied on homegrown reporting solutions. While these reports provided useful insights, building and maintaining them took time and effort. Usability was also limited to the few people involved in creating the reports. Precisely needed a scalable solution that could keep pace with their evolving business priorities. “I was spending a lot of time on engineering reports,” said Even. “It was more important for me to spend that time with the teams, enhancing their best practices. I started wondering whether there was something out there that could give me all that data.”

As Precisely turned its focus to new product development, it started using Jellyfish to track engineering team performance and improve delivery predictability.

Delivering predictability with consolidated reporting

When engineers are building a new product, the rest of the business depends on predictable delivery to inform their work. Precisely uses Jellyfish to improve the predictability of the engineering teams responsible for developing new products. “I was struggling to demonstrate that my team was being efficient. We are now the most predictable business unit at Precisely from a metrics perspective,” shared Ulf Viney, SVP of Engineering at Precisely. 

With Jellyfish velocity metrics, engineers can effectively plan and manage large deliverables, forecast outcomes, and set realistic goals for future sprints. Sprint predictability across the project increased from 55% to 76.5% between the first and last quarter of 2024 — numbers they’re still pushing to improve.

“We’ve been tracking the team’s ability to do higher level planning, built off of velocity and sprint predictability,” said Even. “We’re measuring how close our initial forecasts are. If we throw a date on something, are we hitting it 80% of the time?”

Precisely is also leveraging Jellyfish’s software development benchmarks. By comparing their performance to industry standards, engineering teams can pinpoint areas for improvement and refine their processes with each sprint.

Delivery management improves as engineering becomes more predictable. Precisely’s engineering leaders can now track progress against delivery goals and use this information to keep teams aligned with business priorities. “We’re hyper-focused on delivering what’s in progress by a target date and tracking that target date with Jellyfish,” said Even. “The ability to see what’s distracting our engineers is a crucial part of what we’re trying to do from a modernization standpoint. Having the details right there in Jellyfish allows us to make effective business decisions”.

Data as a starting point for meaningful conversations

Precisely’s engineering leaders use Jellyfish to start productive conversations with team members. When a manager sees something in Jellyfish that’s not quite right, they can take that data to the engineer, discuss the challenges they’re facing, and work together on a solution. “In order to be disciplined you need visibility. We’re very excited about what Jellyfish has done to contribute to how we run our teams. Every conversation I have involves Jellyfish,” shared Viney.

Jellyfish also helps unblock teams faster. By exposing issues engineers are yet to escalate, leaders can address problems sooner and get teams back on track.

The ability to break a deliverable down to the teams involved has also improved collaboration and cohesion. “Teams can see how they fit into the bigger story of the deliverable — that’s really helped our teams come together,” added Even. 

Data is helping build trust between different departments at Precisely. With access to velocity metrics, engineering teams can clearly communicate their capacity to product management and set realistic expectations around deliverables. When something doesn’t go as planned, managers can offer more detailed explanations, backed by trusted data. A team member going on leave or getting sick can hurt results  — before Jellyfish, these details got lost in the shuffle. 

Expanding beyond new developments

Having improved the predictability of the new product team, Precisely is now looking to extend Jellyfish to other engineering areas. With Precisely currently using Jellyfish to track just over 170 of its 600 engineers, there are plenty of opportunities for growth.

 

Overall, Precisely hopes to build on what they have achieved over the past year. By continuing to track engineering metrics in Jellyfish, Precisely can keep pushing towards their 80% sprint predictability target and drive even greater business outcomes. 

“2024 was a year of focus. Before, we were trying to do too many things at once. This year we’ve flipped the script — making sure teams are focused and working on the right things, that they’re not interrupted and we don’t change the plans a whole lot. Jellyfish is part of that story,” said Even.