Thieme Compliance – On the way to project organization: Agile project portfolios with Atlassian tools

Thieme Compliance offers clinics, hospitals and practices solutions for patient education and communication. A network of more than 400 medical authors, editors, renowned lawyers and IT experts ensures the highest quality of products and solutions.

In 2016, the company decided to map its projects across departments using a single tool. Rainer Friedensohn, who, as Director IT & QMS, is responsible for the IT systems, describes the situation at the time as follows: “At that point, projects in the company were mapped using a variety of tools, from Excel spreadsheets to MS Project to whiteboards. The goal was to achieve transparency across all projects, initiatives and plans.”
Since Thieme Compliance had already used Jira and Confluence in individual departments, the decision was made to also implement project portfolio management (PPM) and demand management using the Atlassian tools. In addition, the Marketplace app “BigPicture Enterprise” (SoftwarePlant) was introduced because, as the name suggests, it provides a “big picture” view of all projects within the company. In addition to the central overview of all projects, the tools should also be used to control resources, to visualize dependencies - both within and across projects - and to link portfolio projects with corporate goals.

In an initial workshop with catworkx, the foundations were laid for the introduction of the new PPM system. For example, criteria were defined to determine which of the approximately 150 projects at the time were projects at all and which could be classified as routine tasks. The latter do not require representation in the PPM.
Subsequently, workflows were modeled using Jira software to define the workflow from the initial request to the implementation of projects. Confluence is used for project documentation. The templates support the standardization and automation of documentation.

The successful introduction of Atlassian tools for project portfolio management at Thieme Compliance meant that projects could now be found in one place, centralized for each department and team. This also makes the dependencies between projects visible. The Marketplace App “BigPicture Enterprise” supports this with its Gantt charts, synchronization with Jira and the clear display of dependencies and resources.
The company-wide introduction of Jira software and Confluence also favored the cultural change in the company towards a project organization. And last but not least, the number of tools used could be reduced and costs saved.
“catworkx provided us with excellent support during the implementation because, in addition to helping us develop the workflows, we were also able to benefit from best practices during the implementation. In addition, the catworkx licensing department is helping us very well with managing the Atlassian licenses,” concludes Rainer Friedensohn.

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