Mimacom provides consulting services for ZID Basel to implement Jira / Confluence

The ZID is the IT service provider of the government of Basel, providing excellent and economical IT services for public administration. The ZID supplies basic IT services across departments. Customers include departments and agencies of the cantonal administration, their operational units, and public sector organizations. As a single source of professional IT support, the ZID meets the public administration’s requirements for efficiency, quality, security, reliability and flexibility. They offer three types of services: IT workplaces, IT platforms, and e-government.

The challenge of ZID Basel

The e-government (GOV) section comprises four teams, fulfilling different software development tasks. One team develops applications with JAVA technology and one with Microsoft’s #.net technology, the third is responsible for the web presence www.bs.ch and the last handles data management. Having different fields of activity led these teams to follow different processes and use different work management tools. The team leads, as well as the employees, faced major organizational challenges in coordinating the overall tasks and projects. Already now, collaboration within teams is an important success factor; in the near future it will be even more so. The consolidation of important processes and the use of shared tools are important steps in the right direction.

The solution: agile consulting and iterative service development

Mimacom and the team leads collaborated to define the objectives to be achieved, together compiled the solution, and last but not least, configured it using JIRA and Confluence. Taking an iterative approach was a key positive aspect of the progress. Iteration meant that the solution could be developed, defined, and configured step by step and that know-how could be developed and shared within ZID. In the final configuration, the issue tracking system JIRA, with the plugins used (Agile, Tempo, Structure, etc.), has a fundamental role in the toolchain of the GOV division. A standard process is defined in JIRA to be used by all teams: this has greatly improved the communication and coordination effort across all teams. A cross-departmental mandate management system was also established, enabling the manager and team leaders to check the current state of an order, project or plan at any time with a single mouse click. In addition, a JIRA idea management system was implemented and introduced for the bs.ch website. It allows a variety of stakeholders to use different functionalities, such as generating ideas and assessing and commenting on them. Confluence, another Atlassian application, serves as a wiki. With both applications now well integrated, the e-government division has established a solid base for further collaboration and can concentrate on the technical difficulties.