A multinational alternative investment manager in New York, with more than $500 billion in assets under management, ran technology delivery through Jira across private equity, real estate, credit, and hedge fund lines. Teams used Agile ceremonies but had never been formally trained, prioritization was ad hoc, and cross-functional teams were working 80-hour weeks while switching focus mid-sprint to absorb support requests.
The challenge
Delivery was tracked by the number of epics shipped, with no shared definition of an epic. Jira itself had drifted, with unused custom fields, screen schemes, and workflows making the data model inconsistent and hard to scale. Leadership wanted an outside read on process, culture, and tooling, and a path to predictable delivery.
How we helped
We started with a firm-wide assessment, interviewing the CTO, senior managing directors, and senior vice presidents. From those findings we trained teams in hybrid ScrumBan for high-priority support work, instituted monthly intake for new initiatives, made retrospectives standard with a firm-wide retrospective of retrospectives, and implemented a revised SDLC framework across technology. On the tooling side, we rebuilt Jira's data model, removing unused fields, screens, schemes, and workflows, and added permission schemes per product line so teams could hold focus.
The result
After a year, developer productivity was up more than 40 percent. 63 percent of unused custom fields were deprecated, over 170 projects were consolidated and archived, and support work was tracked separately, with more than 1,800 issues completed by dedicated triage teams. Leadership now communicates in goals and initiatives, reads capacity and velocity from dashboards, and governs tooling through a central Jira steering committee.