Collaborating for a cure

“A lot of people working here are touched by cancer. They have people in their family or people they know. And I think coming here to work every day, it gives you a sense of mission and purpose that you wouldn't necessarily have in another place,” says Greg Franklin, Agile Lead at Cancer Research UK. He and his team have a vision of a world without cancer. In the UK, the charity’s work has helped double the survival rate of cancer patients over the last four decades. By 2034, their aim is to accelerate progress so that 3 in 4 people survive cancer. Long-term, the organization envisions a world without cancer.

While passion and agility keep Cancer Research UK (CRUK) striding forward today, that wasn’t always the case. In the past, the passion was there, but the agility wasn’t. In 2013, the decision to bring a large portion of web development in-house bogged the team down. Projects were tracked in scattered silos, and this hampered productivity in a major way.

It was clear that the workflow needed an overhaul, but the budget constraints of a nonprofit stood in the way. Luckily, Atlassian offers its products to charities at no cost under a community license, and this was a key factor in CRUK’s decision to adopt Jira and Confluence. Maria Bonorchis, one of the organization's Agile Delivery Managers, elaborates: “It means we can be as efficient as corporations that have loads of money to spend on tools. Ultimately, we are raising money for research into cures for cancer. Every little bit helps.”

The development team committed to Jira after a brief trial, starting with the migration of bug tracking from another tool. Soon, Jira became the go-to for user stories, and then made its way to the business intelligence department. Now, even the .NET team is transitioning to Jira. Greg Franklin has played a big role in the process. “I was pretty much Mr. Jira for a while,” he says. “I was the only Jira admin.” He made videos and tutorials for the team and held workshops too. Eventually, with some training from Atlassian Solution Partner Clearvision, CRUK was able to onboard multiple admins, and adoption spread even further.

Today, CRUK have increased their pace and quality of delivery with Jira, Confluence and more recently, Trello. Technical teams and business teams alike have selected Confluence for team collaboration because it is so intuitive and user-friendly. Following an aggressive program to spread Agile across the charity, several non-technical teams have adopted Trello in order to better visualize their work and collaborate to get it done. Jira’s viral adoption across the organization has yielded untold rewards. As software teams adopted Jira, coupled with an Agile approach, the pace of delivery from idea to reality has exploded. Very soon after a large customer data team migrated off other tools onto Jira, they were releasing major changes monthly compared to bi-annually.

Smaller teams are benefitting too, says Greg. When he started, there were only three web teams. Now, the organization has a microservices implementation and many product and technical teams. Jira enables them to review code quickly and efficiently, allowing them release hundreds of updates per year compared to two per month. When you’re talking about updates that can save lives – information for patients, fundraising campaigns – it’s easy to understand the impact of such a jump in productivity.

“I think we all understand the strategy of the organization,” says Greg. “All of us know that the goal is to reach three-in-four survival rate by the year 2034. That's been declared by the chief exec. So, I think when you have an organization with that shared vision, you can really work miracles.”