Bringing Organization to Terminix’s IT Team:
Consolidating Jira Workflows and Leveraging Roadmaps for Jira
For Terminix, a leading pest control provider with nearly 11,000 employees and 50,000 daily customers, robust IT operations are critical to deliver efficient services. But until recently, an outdated IT infrastructure that was overly complex to manage prevented the team from reaching its potential.
“We had a very decentralized approach to IT intake and project/program management,” said Kevin Schumm, VP of IT Planning & Program Management at Terminix. “We wanted to centralize that in a more standardized, organized manner.”
The first step to streamlining Terminix’s IT operations involved migrating their Jira platform from a server to the cloud in May 2021. To make sure the process ran smoothly, Terminix partnered with experts at Contegix to guide the migration. Contegix assessed Terminix’s use of Jira and provided the team with a roadmap to migrate successfully. Throughout the migration, the Terminix team relied on Contegix for ongoing support to ensure Jira would uphold its functionality on the cloud.
Migrating to cloud relieved Terminix of their system admin and hosting responsibilities, allowing the team to focus on optimizing their use of the platform. Terminix’s highly customized configurations meant updates were more difficult to execute, and the existing platform setup withheld full visibility into which efforts overlapped. Terminix called on Contegix once more to help organize their cloud-based Jira platform by consolidating workflows and leveraging Roadmaps for Jira to achieve efficient IT operations.
Simplifying Jira Workflows and Optimizing Roadmaps
Jira projects are often built to correspond to each task. Terminix, however, built Jira projects for each team that used the platform. While this architecture was intuitive at the time it was built, it eventually became unnecessarily complex as the organization’s use of the system expanded.
Before moving to the cloud, Terminix used a Jira add-on called Structure to track their progress across Jira projects and teams. However, because the tool used normal issue linking, Terminix was unable to visualize dependencies within their projects using parent-child relationships or benefit from capabilities like Gantt charting.
Now that the team was on the cloud, Terminix could utilize Roadmaps for Jira, which would enable them to visualize their projects with hierarchies and oversee multiple teams at once more clearly. “We showed Terminix how to replace those improper issue links within Structure with the proper parent-child relationships, so they could get the full use out of Roadmaps on the cloud,” said Shaun Jones, Vice President at Contegix.
Since introducing Roadmaps for Jira, Contegix has helped Terminix break down complicated customizations and set each team up with the same workflow. “On an almost weekly basis for 30 to 60 minutes, Shaun was in the tool with us, hands on, looking at what our teams had set up and advising us on the steps we needed to take,” said Schumm.
Contegix identified that Terminix had four core project styles and could simplify their back end by taking advantage of the scheme approaches in Jira. As a result, Terminix archived many old projects and cut down on unused issue types and workflows, ultimately making their system lighter and easier to navigate from an administrative perspective.
“We’re now able to operate in a completely standardized way,” said Schumm. “We previously had nearly 90 customized workflows. We now have four to five. We used to have 30 to 40 issue types. We now have about 12. In terms of fields or screens, we had 350 and now we’re down to 50.”
Achieving Operational Efficiency with Jira Service Management
Thanks to the renewed level of organization within Terminix’s Jira platform, the team is able to extend its use of the platform, using capabilities such as Jira Service Management to accomplish new goals.
Contegix recently helped Terminix add Jira Service Management on the top of their platform to streamline and centralize all incoming business requests for IT partnership—something teams previously had different approaches and tools to manage. The standard approach and seamless integration has resulted in a more efficient and less prone to human error process.
Terminix is able to better function as a unified team with this newly organized IT infrastructure. And now, the team can approach organization-wide projects more strategically.
Learn more about how your organization can work with Contegix to optimize your Jira solutions.