Interview with Platinum Atlassian Experts, Addteq – a leader in providing business solutions to Enterprise clients for more than 10 years.
1. How has Addteq’s journey been in the past 10 years? Any changes that you are particularly proud of?
Sukhbir Dhillon says, “Addteq went through re-org in 2012 for the better future and it’s hunger to make a difference in the DevOps space. Journey since then was scary initially for the first couple of years but we kept improving every day and our year over year growth validates the hard work and clarity of vision. The major change beside gathering the awesome team is building the brand Addteq. Today many of fortune 500 knows Addteq by its name for the service they receive from this talented team.”
2. What does Addteq specialize in?
Addteq is considered to be the DevOps Experts. Beyond being Platinum Atlassian Experts, Addteq understands that there are other technologies used within development and operations teams. We partner with the top technologies to give clients the best experience when they adopt the DevOps process. We have a variety of experience in implementation, migration, adoption, upgrades and much more.
3. How has JIRA changed the world of Project Management?
Most Project Management tools were thick clients and needed software installed on everyone’s machine. Deployments and Upgrades were difficult. Development community was writing web based software using thick client based software and nothing seemed right. JIRA changed that by only providing web based interface. It stayed very agile and never tried to cater to the waterfall community. It lowered the barrier of entry for developers to try new issue tracking tool for their needs.
4. What are the main challenges of implementing JIRA in large/small organisations?
Small organization are easier to deal with when it comes to emerging tech. They are not an elephant and hence it is easier for them to turn when needed. Bigger organizations for the lack of a good word becomes the elephant who doesn’t like change. Every team wants to have their own workflow. It becomes difficult to get them to agree on fewer workflows and agile upgrade cycles. Someone told me once that if we automate everything, one day it will wake up and do something it is not supposed to.
5. How are add-ons from the Atlassian marketplace changing the landscape?
“I think that add-ons are changing the landscape of Atlassian products because it allows them to be more customizable. Before, everyone was concerned with the out-of-the-box features of the Atlassian toolset. If those features did not match up with what the client needed, then they would not see Atlassian as their solution. Now, because of the vast variety of add-ons available on the Atlassian Marketplace, it allows the products to have better and more integratable features! Causing much more usability across all teams in an organization”, says Himanshu Chhetri, Addteq’s CTO. .
6. What do you think of continuous feedback / performance reviews / OKRs in JIRA? How would they help these companies?
JIRA is the perfect tool for continuous feedback. But it is not a good tool by itself for performance review/OKR’s. After trying it few times for the same task, I discovered that making use of JIRA custom fields can be helpful only to a certain extent. For performance reviews, JIRA and confluence integration is a perfect tool as it gives the users freedom to express as much without being constrained by fields.
Interestingly, UpRaise doesn’t make use of custom fields but rather creates its own entities in JIRA for Performance Reviews & OKRs features. This will certainly be helpful for companies as then they would have JIRA as a single source of truth – for day to day tasks, bigger picture goals & contextual feedback.
Interview with Himanshu Chhetri, CTO Addteq. Addteq has been a leader of providing business solutions to Enterprise clients for more than 10 years. Through the use of DevOps automation, Addteq strives on creating innovative solutions to solve business processes. Clients depend on Addteq to provide Atlassian solutions, create custom add-ons, conduct training, offer hosting and staffing, perform DevOps services, and provide overall support services. Being named one of Atlassian’s Platinum Experts, Addteq delivers superior results within a range of industries, specifically to major companies such as Cisco, MetLife and Bank of America. Addteq’s headquarters is found in Princeton, New Jersey, with offices around the globe.
