SAZKA: Implementation of Atlassian tools

Customer problem

SAZKA, the oldest and largest lottery company in the Czech Republic, faced fragmentation of the tools used in the development department, in addition to lacking an overview of the plan and status of current development projects.

Only the implementation of a suitable end-to-end software development management tool could solve the situation, which would establish a unified environment and unified process for all agendas in SAZKA, transparent communication across internal and external teams and provide an overview of the state of all systems under development. In addition, the solution had to be easily configurable in order for the SAZKA Technology division to have no difficulties in using the tool. It was therefore decided to use Atlassian tools as they are flexible enough, easy to configure, and user-friendly.

The employees of the SAZKA Technology division had only partial user experience with Jira. In addition, a lack of their own capacities prevented them from the implementation. So SAZKA turned to our Atlassian team.

Solution

We built the main solution on Atlassian Jira Software and Jira Service Management (server). With the help of Jira Software and third-party add-ons, we have implemented a unified process and environment for all development projects. With the introduction of Jira Service Management, we have extended the solution to the internal service desk and incident and defect management so that, in addition to changes and new requirements, the customer themselves can also manage bug and incident fixes in Jira.

We have further integrated the entire solution with several different service desks so that the suppliers can solve requests using their own systems (e.g. Jira, ZenDesk). We have achieved partial automation of the development process by using custom Groovy scripts within the ScriptRunner app. The delivery also included custom development of a mini add-on for integration of Jira with ESB SAZKA to allow sending SMS notifications.

We have done a lot of work with the customer, but we are not finished yet – we provide 24/7 support to SAZKA and we are fine-tuning their IT service desk before putting it into live operation.

Interesting points and challenges

The customer was so satisfied with the new solution that they decided to implement Jira Software even in non-IT departments. At present, Jira Software is used not only by developers, but also, for example, by employees of the Risk management and Compliance department.