Atlassian Tool Implementation

About Simplyhealth The Challenge

Simplyhealth has been helping people with their everyday

health for over 140 years and now helps nearly 3.5 million

customers. Its roots are in the hospital funds set up in the

Victorian era to help working people save for their medical

care, and it still follows mutual values today. Simplyhealth

believes in helping people, whether it’s caring for the elderly

or supporting people with their mental health, corporate

giving is central to its purpose to help even more people.

Last year Simplyhealth donated £1.6 million to healthcare

charitable causes.

Simplyhealth is the UK’s leading provider of health cash

plans, dental payment and pet health plans. Its retail

division, The Unlimited Company, offers a range of

premium daily living aids and mobility products to support

people with their mobility and independence.

Simplyhealth’s previous IT service desk was dated and

provided no visibility to its internal customers on their

issues and requests. The team had to spend a lot of

time updating colleagues and internal customers on the

statuses of their calls. Limited self help was available but

the IT team found this difficult to maintain and provide

visibility to the customer of what was available.

Project visibility was limited to people working on the same

project. Simplyhealth needed a tool which provided greater

visibility on projects, making information more available

for everyone. A centralised and manageable place for

knowledge sharing and ‘how to‘ documentation was also

required which Simplyhealth could keep up to date.

Industry: Health and Dental Insurance

PAGE 1 - CLEARVISION CASE STUDY, SIMPLYHEALTH COPYRIGHT © CLEARVISION-CM 2016

The solution

Replacement of our IT Service desk

solution led us to selecting the JIRA

Service Desk and therefore Clearvision,

we have seen some impressive results

among these was our resolution in the

1st line team jump from 42% to 77%.

- Chris Dale, Head of Testing at Simplyhealth

“

Once the Atlassian tool set had been identified to meet

these requirements, Simplyhealth required consulting

services regarding the Atlassian stack to further define

workflows and process for tools such as JIRA Service

Desk, JIRA Agile & Confluence.

Clearvision worked onsite with Simplyhealth for three

working days to review current tooling, processes,

workflow setup and environments, as well as interviewing

key members of the team to define their goals for the

Atlassian environment.

JIRA Service Desk (JSD) makes it easier for Simplyhealth

to serve its internal customers and for those customers to

ask for help with smart, automated knowledge base

Simplyhealth is using JIRA Agile (now a part of JIRA Software). This gives the

team the flexibility to plan and adopt any agile practice, whether it be scrum,

kanban, or a mixed methodology. Teams can now create and estimate stories,

build a sprint backlog, visualise activity, measure team velocity, and report on

progress.

Additionally, Clearvision provided Simplyhealth with Confluence, a

communication and collaboration platform that allows for transparency within

various departments, vastly improving the communication within and across

teams. Confluence is a wiki used by more than half of Fortune 100 companies

to connect people with the content and co-workers they need to get their

jobs done faster. Now that Simplyhealth has joined these companies in using

Confluence, it can connect its entire business in one place online to collaborate

and capture knowledge, ideas, documents, minutes and projects. By utilizing all

of these tools, Simplyhealth now has better visibility over the work of its teams,

and can manage time more efficiently.

suggestions. It provides a support portal for both internal

and external customers, where they can quickly and

simply raise support tickets.

With JSD, agents have visibility on how much time has

elapsed on the ticket raised, and automations can also be

set up, allowing agents to focus on solving the important

jobs and helping to lighten the workload. The aim here

was to drive more collaboration and knowledge sharing

from Simplyhealth 2nd, 3rd line teams up to 1st line

teams, thus protecting the innovation and project teams

and allowing them to deliver more value.

PAGE 2 - CLEARVISION CASE STUDY, SIMPLYHEALTH COPYRIGHT © CLEARVISION-CM 2016

To boost adoption of these new tools, Simplyhealth

required training and selected Clearvision JIRA Basics

course, to be delivered to 20 users in its Andover

office. This training provided Simplyhealth with an

understanding of basic JIRA concepts including working

with issues, searching and reporting. At the end of

the course, users were able to use JIRA to work with

issues and provide tracking and control for software

development projects. Simplyhealth also underwent

JIRA Advanced training, providing teams with a more

advanced understanding of the various ways that JIRA

can be tailored to meet specific custom project and

process requirements.

The training included lab exercises, which gave users a

practical working area to engage with, enabled them to

benefit from seeing JIRA in action with real world settings

and examples, translating the theory from the course into

practical knowledge. Clearvision additionally provided

two days mentoring, designed primarily for identified

Atlassian Admin users and senior IT Management. This

involved one on one training with our consultants around

Simplyhealth system tools.

Training was provided to a group

of people which we identified

as superusers to allow as much

empowerment of the end user

as possible and reduce the

systems administration.

- Chris Dale, Head of Testing at Simplyhealth

“

Now and the future

Simplyhealth is increasing collaboration and visibility

across teams with the use of Confluence. While it is only

used by the IT department at the moment, Simplyhealth

has plans to roll out its Confluence instance to the wider IT

Department and Business Unit.

Moreover, Simplyhealth is planning on integrating JIRA

with Bitbucket Server which will enable the team to:

• See the related branch, commit and pull request

information in a JIRA issue

• Create Git branches from within JIRA and JIRA Agile

• Transition JIRA issues from within Bitbucket Server

• Use JIRA issue keys in Bitbucket Server markdown

• See the details for JIRA issues in Bitbucket Server

• See, in Bitbucket Server, the JIRA issues related to

Bitbucket Server commits and pull requests

• See development information in JIRA, such as

Branches and Commits from Bitbucket

The company is also focusing on asset management and

risks and issue process. With the help of JIRA Software,

all activities around an asset can be stored in one place.

JIRA makes it easy to build an effective history on every

asset. Teams will be able to know who’s responsible for a

particular asset thanks to the assignee field, and JIRA keeps

a rich audit trail, so it’s easy to know the story behind each

asset. When it comes to release management, teams gain

further visibility thanks to Bitbucket, and are able to view

commits history against JIRA issues. Workflow processes

from JIRA help teams to master release management

since it adds structure and provide additional reporting

capabilities.

Overall, the company will see huge cost savings by

effectively mastering the discipline of asset management.

PAGE 3 - CLEARVISION CASE STUDY, SIMPLYHEALTH COPYRIGHT © CLEARVISION-CM 2016

A wiki solution that offers

Simplyhealth better visibility across

teams and their work.

For real-world examples and learning

by doing training, with Simplyhealth’s

own system and use cases.

Clearvision is here to help your team with

everything you need to work smarter and get the

most from your tools, just like Simplyhealth.

A discovery phase to start the

project, assessing tool usage, pain

points and bespoke requirements.

Issue tracker used for

Simplyhealth’s IT Change, Support

project, and BAU activities.

Simplyhealth’s customer support

portal with smart, automated

knowledge base suggestions.

Clearvision provided the opportunity and facilitation to

accurately draw out the requirements ensuring that we had a

clear understanding of how we were going to implement the

solution and their initial expertise really helped focus us on the

vision and turn this into quick wins so that we could realise

the ROI in the short term.

“

JIRA training & mentoring

System and tools review

The breakdown

Look to Clearvision for some clarity on your tools for your teams.

Speak to us now

- Chris Dale, Head of Testing at Simplyhealth

PAGE 4 - CLEARVISION CASE STUDY, SIMPLYHEALTH COPYRIGHT © CLEARVISION-CM 2016