At the Wehkamp Tech Hub we support Wehkamp with technology in the broadest sense of the word: almost everything is technology. Bigger topics, like the replacement our order management system, require careful planning over teams; we have many of those topics.
When I walk into the room of my boss Jon Higgins (CTO), I'm greeted by a huge planning wall. It feels a bit like one of those big charts the British Navy used in World War II to plan attacks and plot the current situation. While I love the clarity it gives, it also saddens my IT heart a bit: shouldn't we be able to come up with something digital? If it was up to me, I would replace the entire wall with a full touch led panel!
Our former Head of Product, Sander Hoekman, also had the need to share more of the roadmap, so he asked me if I could look into the problem of generating a roadmap report we could share.
Goals of the project
I love to solve multiple problems at once... so I was never going to build just a report... but a tool that would give our organization insights into the roadmap. First we needed to lay the groundwork in terms of specs:
- The data will always live within Jira
The tool will be a read-only view on top of the actual state in Jira Advanced Planning (with some caching for performance). - Reports will be generated from the tool
There was a need for a PDF report, but this report would end up in a Google Slides presentation (often with a low res screenshot). To combat this, we'll generate full HD slides that can be added as images. - Give more love to non-functional programs
Technical programs should be part of the roadmap, as they have an impact on teams and availability. - Give more insights into the complexity of a milestone
When multiple teams are working on the same topic, the topic has a high chance of being complex. Let's plot a list of teams that are working on a milestone. This will also give us insights into which team(s) might be a bottleneck, due to their workload. - Help tech leadership
Which topics are late? Which topics are replanned? Which topics are being investigated? The roadmap should give leadership input in their weekly meetings. - Access
Not everyone has access to Jira, but let's give our stakeholders access to this tool, so they know what is being worked on and what coming up.
What's the (Jira) Plan?
Due to the nature of the topics we work on, we use many techniques at the team level. The replacement of our VM-ware cluster or a network component, is a project that uses waterfall with clear defined phases. A redesign of our branding is typically a multi team effort that uses agile (scrum or kanban). No matter the technique, all of these topics need to be weighed, planned and discussed. This is were our roadmap comes in.
When moving away from our Jira on premises server to SAAS, we knew we wanted to invest in Jira Advanced Planning. We wanted to be able to give an overview of our topics, to be able to do some planning and visualize our plans. We also wanted to separate the planning (way in advance) from our team planning (agile, and on a per sprint basis).
So we came up with the following structure:
It took some time to set it up, but we got some nice overviews over night. While this was a good improvement, we still lacked some features:
- Which teams are actually working on which roadmap topics?
- How can we give non-technical people access to our roadmap without them having access to Jira?
- How can we be transparent in what what we replan? No plans are static in the real world!
- How can we export our charts to be part of our regular update presentations?
- Personal: how can I build something that can compete with "the wall"?
What did we come up with?
Without going into too many technical details, we used the following tech stack:
- We use Istio + Dex + Google login to give our Wehkamp users access to our application.
- A small Node.js container that fetches the data from Jira.
- A fast single page application that allows the user to interact with the data.
- Some dark CSS magic to plot our milestones and progress bars at the right position on the calendar.
- The excellent HTML to Image library to generate the full HD slides.
Due to obvious reasons, I cannot share the full Wehkamp roadmap, but I can blur the topics and show a single team. Here you can see what the customer service team is working on:
Acknowledgments
Big shout-out to Sander Hoekman, Céleste Polstra, Vincent Wolff, Bart Jansen and Lisette Berghuis for the collaboration on this tool and the process to implement the roadmap within the organization.