How Adaptavist optimised Hogar Sí Foundation's agile strategy
The non-profit organisation Hogar Sí, which works under an agile framework, needed a tool to facilitate the ongoing monitoring of its strategy and operational plan. To achieve its goals, Hogar Sí relied on the services of Adaptavist, a solution provider with extensive expertise in advising organisations on optimising project management and delivering work management solutions.
Introduction - about Hogar Sí
HOGAR SÍ is a foundation that applies an innovative approach to tackling homelessness. As a social entity, transparency and accountability are key to its operations.
Area: Non-profit/NGO
Number of employees: 273
Average number of beneficiaries: 3,392
Number of projects in 2024: 142
Implemented tools: Jira, Structure, Trello
The challenge
Hogar Sí needed to enhance its digital transformation. The organisation followed agile principles, but felt the tools it was using for strategic development and monitoring fell short. These tools worked well for daily tasks at an operational level, but did not allow for the implementation of an organisational-wide strategy, alongside monitoring embedded within the agile development practices the organisation had achieved.
The team met Adaptavist at an agile event in Madrid. They needed a solution provider that actively listened to them and adapted to the unique requirements that Hogar Sí has as a non-profit organisation. After several conversations, they decided Adaptavist could adapt well to their needs.
We needed a supplier that was open-minded in how to use Jira as an operational tool, able to provide us with a global vision, and monitor the performance of our strategy.
Vanesa Cenjor
Agile Director, HOGAR SÍ
When we started working with Hogar Sí, each team managed its tasks independently. By unifying project management and standardising processes across the organisation, all employees would collectively benefit from the work of each department, optimising internal project management.
Having identified this, we worked with the client to build a strategy rooted in agile principles and customised to the team’s unique needs.
The solution
To kick off, we worked with Hogar Sí to understand its digital transformation goals. We knew they wanted to evolve, but we needed to understand where exactly they wanted to go to support the team in their transformation journey.
A core sentiment was that the team felt that they needed to change the tools they had been using to manage their work, while improving the organisation's approach to project management more broadly.
Once we had completed the analysis and understood their needs, we developed the following solutions.
Tool replacement: the team needed agile software better adapted to their objectives. Following our advice, Hogar Sí moved from Microsoft Planner to Jira Software, which we felt could be better adapted to the organisation's agile principles.
Jira has opened the team to new ways of documenting and connecting with their work through agile dashboards and sprints. By tracking all the team's work, Jira has also improved the transparency of joint tasks, assignments, and dependencies.
Optimisation and promotion of agile roles: There was a special focus on the team developing agile tasks, such as Product Owners and Scrum Masters, and optimising their roles for the new tasks they needed to perform under their new strategy.
We advised these teams on using the new tools deployed, giving them control over strategic tasks and improving their capacity to face the challenges of their digital transformation. Centralisation of information: We created a project portfolio that unified joint information so that departments have a channel for exchanging and storing information, improving transparency, and driving intra-departmental communication.
In the portfolio, we centralised everything so that all teams can contribute their vision, check the status of a particular project, and better understand the dependencies between projects.This improved alignment of the projects within the organisation's strategy, solving one of the biggest challenges the organisation had before working with Adaptavist.
OKR methodology deployment: Hogar Sí had already implemented the OKR methodology, a collaborative work management method typical of agile ways of working, to deploy the strategy and operational plan. This methodology is based on objectives (qualitative, aspirational, and long-term) and key results (practical, concrete, and measurable).
Setting OKRs is like using a compass: everything must point in the right direction. To reach the correct path, all departments and teams must work together. To assure the project's success, the team needed to centralise information, understand dependencies and the perspectives that each department and team member brings, optimise the final results, and make the appropriate adjustments in Jira.
We have become more aware of the strategy, and the team now knows how its day-to-day work feeds into the operational plan.
Alba Escribano
Scrum Master
The results
After several months working with Adaptavist to optimise agile tooling and synchronise OKRs, Hogar Sí has:
- Created and customised 10 new agile projects, with Sprints and Scrum boards, adapting each to unique business needs
- Automated and better distributed work under the OKR methodology, so the team focuses its attention on value-adding tasks
- Clarified the variation of the tasks as they are assigned to a specific professional in relation to each one's responsibility.
- Deployed an operational plan that details the strategy by correctly measuring OKRs.
Extended the functionality of Jira with Adaptavist by developing and implementing bespoke functionality to better measure OKRs, customised to the client's objectives.
Project data
42 people working on the project
30,000 tickets opened throughout the project
42 challenges and 117 OKR goals
Conclusion
Working with Adaptavist, Hogar Sí has successfully transformed its approach to project and work management with a fully customised solution built on Atlassian tools.
The project evolved as the organisation’s objectives changed and progressed, and Adaptavist played a fundamental role in meeting these evolutions by providing support, resolving doubts, and advising on planning and costs.
Together we have overcome numerous challenges, including development attempts that did not work out, and changes in course to adjust Atlassian tooling to meet the results the customer expected. But we were able to overcome these difficulties due to active listening and constant dialogue between both parties. Thanks to this understanding between client and supplier, the implementation, adaptation, and design of Hogar Sí’s strategy, led by Adaptavist, has been successful.
Due to its partnership with Adaptavist, the client has better adapted its daily agile work to organisational needs, and agile project management has been optimised from high-level strategy down to the daily tasks of agile teams. With our consultancy, Adaptavist has made a true difference in how the client organises its work management.
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