This article is part of an ongoing series where I discuss how a particular customer in a specific industry uses OneDesk.
With the rising popularity of cryptocurrency and blockchain, financial technologies are in high demand. Whether it’s peer-to-peer lending, robo-advisors, building a platform for a bank’s services, or just implementing a payment system, financial technology projects and software have many parts to them. Because this is such sensitive information, a lot of thought needs to be given to security and how that factors into architecture and design.
That being said, no complex software successfully releases without any bugs, and customers are sure to encounter them or request changes. As software developers work on these fixes and features they need to ensure that they still maintain the current product and address security concerns. One team of financial software developers came to us seeking a solution to help them manage their work in this industry.
Our client develops software for financial institutions. They are considered a core provider as these institutions use their software to keep their businesses running. Because they create, distribute, and support software, our client identified a need to be able to track work on both those fronts. Not only does our client support the products that they build, but they also work on bug fixes, enhancements, and develop new products. Our client’s ideal system would allow them to record all of enhancements, bug fixes, and features in a list that their customers can view. By having this broader view of what’s being worked on, our client is then able to identify what they are rolling out in their next release and see what their upcoming workload is like.
At its core, OneDesk is comprised of both a project management tool as well as a helpdesk. This combination captures both sides of the work that our client was looking to track. With OneDesk’s helpdesk tool comes a customizable customer portal. This portal gives end-users the ability to log issues as well as to view and track the requests that they’ve logged. It is through the portal that end-users are able to interact with our client, giving that visibility and direct line of communication. The portal is configurable from its look and feel down to the fields customers fill out when logging issues. This seamlessly incorporates incoming requests into the rest of the OneDesk ecosystem while still maintaining the outward appearance of being our client’s tool, complete with their branding and color scheme. As a company in the financial industry, our client knows how critical it is for their customers to have transparency into progress on bug fixes and enhancements, in order to build that trust and sense of security.
In terms of new products and features, OneDesk has our client covered with our project management software. For every new enhancement, a new project can be set up in OneDesk and then broken down into the tasks so the team can track the work required to complete it. OneDesk offers different views of project tasks that can be tailored to fit the team. From Kanban boards to Scrum story cards to Gantt charts and calendars, our client can view their work at whatever level of detail they need. With our client’s focus on clear releases, OneDesk’s views are invaluable in highlighting what work is underway as well as what is on the horizon. Our client noted all of the different phases and steps required to get a release out: requirements gathering, writing the code, testing, and monitoring. In OneDesk, our client can easily set up each of these steps as phases in a workflow for project tasks. Each task can also be assigned to a particular team member, and with workflow automation, criteria can be specified for the assignment of tasks to be done automatically. The workflow rules that drive automation are configurable so our client can set them up to suit their team’s processes and preferences.
Because OneDesk is both project management software as well as a helpdesk, all work tracked in OneDesk lives in one place. Our client was concerned about incoming requests not entering into the correct workflow or category. This is a valid concern as generally any incoming issues need to be triaged to figure out where they belong. Since everything in OneDesk lives in the same ecosystem, it’s simple for our client to change a feature request (incorrectly logged as an issue by an end-user) into a project task. For example, a customer might email in with a support request that could be solved with a set of troubleshooting steps, but is an obvious pain point that confuses customers time and again. Our client can then make the support ticket into a feature request. This keeps all of the initial details included by the customer, but also ensures that any future work is tracked in the right place.
For our client, OneDesk delivers the perfect combination of tools and features to capture and see all of their work. In the world of finance, customers and users need to feel secure, and so it is crucial for our client to have insight into their customer’s most pressing issues. On top of fixing and addressing these issues, our client also needs to develop new features for their products to remain competitive and up-to-date on the latest security threats. The interplay between these two types of work make OneDesk the ideal solution for our client to track and manage all of the work they do.
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