Hoe de eerste gecertificeerde koolstofneutrale internetprovider van Australië hun servicebeheerprocessen transformeerde

Belong is far from your average telecom company. A subsidiary of Telstra, it was launched in 2013 to help customers looking for simpler, lower-cost plans. Belong’s core philosophy is that internet and mobile services should be affordable and straightforward to use. They’re on a mission to make the world a more inclusive place by doing the right thing – for both customers and the planet. They’re also Australia’s first certified carbon-neutral mobile andinternet provider.

The company is lean and agile and has grown rapidly as they’ve built out capabilities. Doing so has demanded bold thinking and a willingness to transform the way their people work. “Over the past three years, we’ve gone through a whole digital transformation of technology, people, and ways of working,” says Lambros Kallianiotis, previously Belong’s Head of Engineering and now its CTO.

Belong sought a better framework to scale sustainably. One of their key needswas a flexible software solution allowing for full visibility into what each team was doing – from feature development to production incidents – and a way to manage that work and optimize the flow across teams.

With the move to Atlassian products and the help of global professional services company Accenture, Belong was able to maximize productivity and collaboration between teams and the software they use while continuing its transformation journey. And with the benefit of much-improved dashboards and reporting, teams have more autonomy and ownership over their work, plus a better sense of how their efforts benefit the company’s overall mission and results.

Datgene dat werkt beter maken

Het gedecentraliseerde model van Belong stelt unieke eisen aan de manier waarop de dev- en ops-teams werken: 'jij bouwt het, jij beheert het, jij voert het uit'. De teams die nieuwe functies en producten bouwen functioneren als permanente beheerders en beheren deze functies en producten tot en met de productie. De dienstverlening moet klantgericht en geautomatiseerd zijn en afgestemd zijn op een agile manier van werken.

"Onze teams bouwen functies, ze zijn druk bezig met het leveren van nieuwe producten, maar ze ondersteunen tegelijkertijd ook de productie", vertelt Hamdam Bishop, Technology Operations Lead. "We wilden dat de tools die ze gebruikten heel eenvoudig en intuïtief waren en ook konden worden geïntegreerd in hun manier van werken."

De teams gebruikten Confluence en Jira al, maar ze hadden nog maar een beperkt overzicht van wat de producten te bieden hadden. Doordat Atlassian alleen voor sommige teamprocessen werd gebruikt en er verder op tools van derden werd vertrouwd, waaronder voor IT-servicemanagement, zorgde dit voor verstoorde workflows. Lambros zegt dat het systeem in zijn toenmalige vorm niet intuïtief was, geen oplossing bood voor de belangrijkste uitdagingen van de teams en moeilijk te gebruiken en duur was.

Het management van Belong erkende de noodzaak van een echte interne digitale transformatie, waarbij grote herinvesteringen teams de flexibiliteit en informatie moesten geven die ze nodig hadden. Bij het kiezen van een oplossing was hun voornaamste focus een oplossing te vinden waarmee teams konden blijven werken op een manier die hen lean en succesvol maakte.

Andrew Purcell, Head of Delivery and Transformation bij Belong, vertelt: "De samenwerking en planning tussen teams zijn van groot belang om resultaten voor onze klanten te behalen." Hamdam voegt hieraan toe: "Toen we ervoor kozen om verder te gaan met Atlassian, dachten we aan degenen die de tools moesten gaan gebruiken, niet alleen aan de tools zelf. Dat was de drijvende kracht achter onze besluitvorming."

Why standardize on Atlassian?

Belong adopted Jira Align to create greater visibility across the company’s squads with a comprehensive roadmap view, an understanding of dependencies, consolidations of risks, and track value realized across each program increment beyond what was possible only using Jira. This consolidated disconnected planning boards, ad-hoc reports, and manual extracts into a single digital source of truth for delivery planning and has enabled product management leaders to align OKR (outcomes) with Epics (outputs) and visualize a roadmap of all work.

Andrew says that ”Enabling our product teams to continue working in a toolset they know, whilst giving our product and organization leadership a broader and more holistic visibility across all of our missions, has been key to gaining valuable insights to drive action.”

Hamdam says that when Belong assessed its options for operations, Jira Service Management was the tool that best fit what the company needed. Since Belong was already using some Atlassian products in development and engineering, it was logical to expand its use to related tools. With a solid base of familiarity, integration would be easier, and teams would face a flatter learning curve as they adapted to new tools, enabled by Atlassian’s connected platform.

“We saw that Atlassian’s platform had the ability to be customized and tailored to the way we work,” Hamdam says. “That was really important for us. We looked at our process, and then looked at ‘what’s the tool that will support and enhance and enable us to deliver on those processes?’”

Where some solutions required three or four tools to address some of the issues teams were looking to solve, Atlassian combined workflows to minimize context switching, ultimately saving teams time they could use to do more value-add work. When all was said and done, moving to Jira Service Management paid for itself in about a year.

Managing a smooth transition

With the decisions made to adopt Jira Align and transition to Jira Service Management, Belong worked with Solution Partner Accenture, a global professional services company, to integrate into Belong’s agile processes and seamlessly move from legacy toolsets to Atlassian’s products.

“The way the tech toolset supports Belong’s way of working was super important,” notes Nick Howard, Technology Lead at Accenture.”It applies across the teams working day to day – they can do things like connecting a Jira backlog item straight into Confluence, which enables traceability and promotes transparency. That’s how Atlassian’s technology supports company culture as well.”

To make the transition as efficient as possible, Accenture helped the Belong team, across all organizational levels, to learn the most effective usage of Atlassian’s products through training, brainstorming solutions to challenges, and at times, a “test and learn” approach.

Nick says that the key to successful adoption was the way Belong and Accenture collaborated as partners to test each other’s thinking on the transition.

The approach worked.

“While there was a lot of pre-work that went into it, once the switch happened, it was absolutely
seamless,” says Lambros. “The teams just picked it up. Jira Service Management made so much of an improvement to the visibility and the metrics we can get. It’s also very intuitive – that’s been really key in improving the flow of work.”

Andrew adds that “Jira Align has accelerated the continuous uplift of our agile ways of working, through augmenting and not disrupting our existing tools and processes.”

Delivering value as a connected team

After standardizing on Atlassian’s platform, Belong’s teams can now easily see organizational objectives and tie them to department-level projects, what teams are working on, and even what an individual is doing. This ensures teams – and the individuals they’re composed of – are spending their energy on the right things and can see how their work connects to business outcomes. With that improved visibility, team members have more insight into the thinking behind corporate decisions and the outcomes of those decisions. That’s beneficial to the company, of course, but also helps employees feel better about their work. “We’re getting more from the teams, and they’re happier because they’re shipping more often,” says Lambros. Through the use of Atlassian’s products, Belong has enabled teams to tell a clear story about what they do and how it connects them to strategic initiatives.

Higher up the corporate structure, Hamdam, Andrew, and Lambros also agree that Atlassian has given them increased visibility, satisfaction, and productivity, as well as an improved ability to identify potential growth areas. We’re getting more from the teams, and they’re happier because they’re actually shipping more often.

Mensen prioriteit geven boven tools

Het management van Belong richtte zich voortdurend op hoe de tools die ze kozen in het werk van hun team zouden passen, in plaats van andersom. Deze nadruk op mensen en processen, plus voldoende opleiding en training, zorgde voor een soepel verandermanagementproces in de hele organisatie. En de keuze voor een verbonden platform van Atlassian-producten betekende een succesvolle transformatie voor Belong.