When Roberto Velazquez, a Technical Project Manager at Red Hat, joined his team, he quickly discovered a challenge that is all too familiar for many software teams. Disjointed tools, specifically project and code management tools, don’t speak to each other.
Discover how simplifying with Zenhub helped the Red Hat team experience quantifiable productivity gains.
“Zenhub provided this layer of project management in GitHub which brought a level of visibility to us that we didn’t have previously. We now have more visibility and less oversight.”
Roberto Velazquez
Why Roberto’s team at Red Hat prefers Zenhub over Jira
Roberto Velazquez works directly with teams focused on learning and content development at Red Hat Training. His teams are made up of developers and content creators who create learning modules for Red Hat’s training and certifications.
Roberto pointed out, that while Jira offered customization options, it was much too complicated for his team. Jira’s complexity reared its head in two ways:
- Jira does not provide native integration with GitHub. Connecting GitHub and Jira requires a clunky third-party setup and is not straightforward. Even then, the team is forced to work with two separate tools and make duplicate updates. This is a huge focus-stealer and time-suck.
- Roberto’s developers found using Jira to be a productivity drain. Many clicks and steps were required to see different views, like the backlog or board, and to provide updates.
It’s for these two main reasons that Roberto and his team decided on Zenhub as a project management platform. Zenhub’s simple, intuitive interface and direct integration with GitHub immediately solved these two huge pain points for Robero’s team.
And spoiler alert, it wasn’t long before they experienced tangible productivity gains.
How Zenhub’s simplicity turned into Red Hat’s superpower
Roberto’s team switched to Zenhub from Jira to solve those two core challenges we mentioned above. However, after using Zenhub’s features, they’ve experienced a range of improvements.
The Zenhub GitHub Extension
Roberto’s team switched to Zenhub from Jira to solve those two core challenges we mentioned above. However, after using Zenhub’s features for a while, they’ve experienced a range of improvements.
Zenhub’s bread and butter is our GitHub Extension. And while we’ve come a long way in and we’re still working on building out Zenhub into a platform that works independently of GitHub (check out Zenhub Issues if you haven’t yet!), the Zenhub extension for GitHub is still what we’re most known for. And for good reason.
There aren’t many true “hacks” in software project management, but our GitHub extension may just be one of them (if we do say so ourselves). Zenhub’s plug-in layers seamlessly on top of GitHub, meaning code management and project management are happening simultaneously. In our humble brag opinion, that’s about as good as it gets! It’s why we started our company all those years ago.
By allowing developers to continue working where they are most comfortable directly in GitHub, you reduce duplicate updates, improve data accuracy, and make your devs a lot happier.
Zenhub Labels and Board View
Like most teams using Zenhub, Roberto’s team spends a lot of time in Zenhub’s Board view. We like to consider it a ‘home base’ for your team. It’s where you can see your sprint backlog and product backlog, work in progress, and work that’s been closed. You can also customize pipelines for an even more granular or tailored grouping of work. You can see who’s assigned, which sprint or epic an issue belongs to, and much more. It’s truly the heartbeat of software teams using Zenhub.
Labels are the cherry on top of the Board view. Not only do they help teams categorize work for quick reference and power Reports, but they also enable filtering capabilities on the board view.
Roberto’s team loves using Labels for their daily scrum meetings. During their daily scrum, the Red Hat team will easily filter by Label and assignee to see who’s working on what and where it’s at. Roberto pointed out that even if team members are missing from the meetings, it’s really easy to see how work is progressing and who might be blocked.
The best part, he shares, is that all of these insights are available in a single view in Zenhub. Something that’s not possible in Jira, according to Roberto.
Zenhub increased Red Hat’s productivity by 30%
We know that’s quite the claim. But as they say, we come with “receipts”.
With Zenhub, Roberto’s team could:
- Reduce the number of clicks to navigate between views
- Keep project updates on GitHub Issues and not have to provide duplicate updates
- Easily filter to see project status
- Identify priorities and what work is next up easily
- Run more efficient agile meetings
Because of all of these factors, Roberto estimates the team reduced time spent managing software projects by about 4-6 hours per week per developer.
This is based on his estimates that the team spent about 1 hour every working day on updates, and now probably only minutes per day performing these tasks after implementing Zenhub.
Switch from Jira to Zenhub to simplify your project management
Project management shouldn’t be a project in itself. If your team is looking to trim the fat and get back to the core of what software team project management is all about, Zenhub is a great place to start. And if you’ve already been working in GitHub, getting started is a breeze.
Check out our Guide to Migrating from Jira to Zenhub.
Want to learn more about Zenhub? Start a free trial or chat with our sales team for a demo.
