NCR drives payment evolution with Atlassian

Necessity is the mother of invention

When you’ve been in business long enough, you get used to adapting to change and uncertainty. Whenever NCR has faced a major challenge that would knock most companies down, they've instead evolved and come back stronger, better serving their customers and their employees – the drivers of their innovation. 

As NCR adopted agile to fuel their innovation and accelerate delivery, the Engineering team established consistent practices, such as working in quarterly program increments, and ceremonies, such as sprint planning, standups, and sprint reviews with demos. During this process, they realized their toolset wasn’t fully supporting their efforts and goals. “We're always trying to deliver fast, innovate fast, and create awesome customer experiences. It often comes down to people, processes, and tooling,” says Arthur Meloy, VP of Innovation and Development Transformation. “We have thousands of highly motivated engineers with modern skills, but they were mostly relying on spreadsheets and Smartsheets to keep up with tasks. We wanted to take all that grunt work out of it so the teams could really focus on producing value for our clients.”

One solution, speaking everyone’s language

When NCR began their scaled agile transformation, Engineering was using Confluence to store knowledge, Jira to track tasks and issues, and spreadsheets to roll up their data into a comprehensive view for product owners and leadership. NCR was the first enterprise business to use Jira Align (formerly AgileCraft) when they adopted it in 2015 to support their Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) transformation, but it wasn’t until 2017 that they fully embraced it with training and support from Solution Partner Cprime. 

“We were using Jira to do agile planning and operate day to day as an engineering team, but we needed a better way to bubble up big projects to a higher level and coordinate between projects with different timing, dependencies, and change management,” Arthur says. “We started to adopt Jira Align to glue it all together so we could see one view of all the solutions and dependencies, and the cascading effect of each change. That helps us make informed decisions, like whether we want to re-allocate people to meet a date or let it slip while knowing the implications.”

Since going all-in on Jira Align, NCR has used it in tandem with Jira and Confluence to keep all stakeholders in lockstep throughout strategic planning and daily execution. 

As NCR’s Product team receives market and customer feedback that informs fixes, improvements, and new solutions, Product Managers and Owners use Jira Align to create requirements for program increments, then break them down into epics and stories. That information automatically cascades to Jira, where engineers plan and execute sprints, using Confluence along the way to create documentation and collaborate and leveraging Jira Align to manage cross program dependencies and risks. Slack notifications are triggered anytime something changes in Jira, so all users can maintain passive awareness and visibility into changes that may have downstream effects.

A future in the cloud

As other teams saw how the Atlassian ecosystem was supporting Engineering’s collaboration and innovation, they began experimenting with it too. Today, Professional Services and all technical teams (including software, hardware, and IT) use Jira for task and issue management, and the entire company uses Confluence to document and share knowledge. 

Having a central source of truth and cloud-based solutions shifted from a convenience to a critical need as NCR went remote and continued innovating during the coronavirus pandemic. “Confluence is great for asynchronous communication and capturing knowledge, which are both extremely important to operate effectively in a remote setting,” Arthur says. 

He adds that NCR plans to move other solutions to the cloud over time to continue making it easier to securely work from distributed locations and spend more time on innovation. “If you’re using cloud-based offerings, you can focus on your core competencies instead of worrying about infrastructure or headcount to manage this environment 24/7/365. All that stuff you can brush aside because your vendor is magically managing it.”

Simple, made possible – and measurable

While NCR has boasted a world-class engineering team for decades, the company now has the modern processes and platforms needed to continue delivering world-class payment solutions for decades to come. 

Using agile principles to guide their work and Atlassian to plan and execute, the team not only says they prioritize the customer experience, but also measures how well they’re doing. “To provide great service, we need to be able to manage and measure our external backlog of defects, arrival rates, internal defect backlogs, and our responsiveness and resolution times for our clients. And from a delivery perspective, we have a ‘Say/Do’ ratio: Did we deliver on schedule? With quality? On budget? Using Jira and Jira Align, we can track all of that and make sure we’re hitting the mark on every dimension.”

Free from the waterfall processes, spreadsheets, and disconnected systems that were holding them back, NCR has increased NPS and accelerated delivery of new capabilities and fixes from every few months to every single day. Now that they’re firing on all cylinders and empowering their people even more, they feel more equipped than ever to deliver on the promise they make to their customers: “Simple, Made Possible.” 

“Atlassian helps with organization, speed, and transparency,” Arthur says. “When you have engineers and lines of business across the world, it’s a real beast to organize our work. Having one system of record that works across all of those is invaluable. Without that, you don’t have the speed to deliver. You also need transparency as to what's being delivered and changed so the business can course correct. Atlassian has delivered a tremendous amount of value for us, and that trickles down to our customers.”