The hotly competitive online travel market doesn’t tolerate inefficiency. Global travel search site Skyscanner Ltd. discovered that a tool it employed to improve bug tracking in the IT organization had much broader efficiency benefits across the 770-person company.

Founded in 2003, Skyscanner is an international concern with offices in 10 cities across Europe, Asia and North America. Its meta-search engine supports 30 languages and 70 currencies.

Last year the company adopted JIRA, a project tracking and planning tool for software development teams made by Atlassian Corp. PLC. The new-found ability to capture bug reports, assign priorities and track them through to a solution brought immediate improvements to IT efficiency. But Skyscanner saw bigger potential.

“We’re very much about continuous improvement,” said Laura Haines (right), product and operations lead for Americas. For the company’s employees, “looking for efficiencies is second nature.”

Tools like JIRA improve process efficiency by capturing requests in a database and tracking them to ensure that they’re acted upon. Software development teams and customer service organizations understand the value of project tracking systems, but the technology isn’t often used in other disciplines.

Instead, many companies use email for routine requests such as permission to purchase office equipment or even hire new employee. The result: misplaced requests, lack of follow-up and no visibility into process.

Skyscanner brought in JIRA Service Desk to see if its IT successes could be duplicated in other parts of the business. Now nearly everyone in the company is on board.

JIRA Service Desk has “offered us the ability to surface our processes so we can optimize them,” Haines said. “We had good operational metrics, but the actual interactions between teams wasn’t as well integrated.”

Skyscanner uses JIRA Service Desk to track all kinds of tasks. It can assign priorities and set alerts to fire off if requests exceed a certain period of time in queue. All parties can review a ticket’s status at any time and see who’s working on it.

Process improvement

The company was able to document workflows, identify inefficiencies and optimize processes. Tickets for common requests – such a the provisioning or new office space, – were standardized to capture detail information that was often overlooked in the past. That translates into faster response times and fewer hours wasted bouncing updates back and forth by e-mail.

“JIRA Service Desk captures everything from the first request and tracks everything that happens after that,” Haines said. “There’s a very complex database behind it.”

Equally important is that JIRA Service Desk formalized collaborative processes and got people talking more constructively. “It helped surface bugs in operations so we could figure out better how to collaborate,” Haines said. “We noticed a massive improvement in teams working together.”

Process transparency also identified tasks and people that weren’t needed. That’s cut average meeting times from 30 minutes to 22 minutes and improved efficiency by making sure only the necessary people are in the room.

The IT organization has documented a 44 percent improvement in process efficiency despite a 236 percent increase in tickets since it adopted JIRA. The growth in bug reports isn’t a bad thing. JIRA Service Desk has made it easier for users to flag problems that previously wouldn’t have been reported. Skyscanner estimates that developer collaboration has doubled.

It all adds up to moving Skyscanner closer to its goal of “autonomy, continual improvement and keeping teams moving as fast as possible,” Haines said.