SUCCESS
STORY

MASMOVIL redesigns its customer service process in Jira Data Center

MASMOVIL is the leading growth operator of telecommunications services in Spain in recent years. The speed of growth, the high level of engineering and efficiency, and its characteristic customer service are a challenge in themselves.

MASMOVIL is a group formed by the acquisition and integration in less than 10 years of brands such as Pepephone, Yoigo, Lebara, LLamaya, Lyca or Euskaltel. Companies that in many cases already had a Jira and where the MASMOVIL platform itself, which has been an Atlassian client for many years, also joined.

It must be considered that a system designed to support the operations of a company with less than one million customers cannot respond to the challenges of growing to more than 14 million customers. Faced with this situation, MASMOVIL turns to TecnoFor to help it design and deploy its new Jira.

When we landed and met the Grupo MASMOVIL team in March 2020, we knew that the project would be quite a challenge: very dynamic people, with great knowledge of Jira, who had been using the performance of the different platforms they had inherited to the maximum for years. They were able to manage 300,000 tickets per month on a single-node Jira Service Desk Server. Therefore, it was at the limit of its performance, but it was fascinating just to see it work. But that was precisely what immediately pushed us towards the idea of ​​Aníbal González, head of technological strategy at TecnoFor, which gave rise to the project:

“MASMOVIL didn’t need help with Jira, but rather with how to move its processes to Jira”.

A very common mistake among corporate clients is seeing Jira as a single platform. It is common to hear: “we have set up a Jira, and since we have it we are putting everything they ask of us into the platform”. However, the characteristics that make Jira a flexible and quickly customizable platform make it very difficult for the different philosophies with which we develop the systems that support a company to coexist: if your priority is the stability of the system, do not apply the same design that the speed of response.

Not all systems have the same compliance requirements, data analysis, necessity for functional evolution…

So, our first contribution was to identify the functional domains into which MASMOVIL is divided and design a Jira Software Data Center platform, multi-environment and horizontally scalable, for each of them. Each one would maintain an identical technical architecture, to facilitate its management from the infrastructure area, but with sufficient autonomy to evolve functionally in the way they need it without interfering in the rest.

Evidently, in MASMOVIL’s culture, it is implantable to reduce the collaboration of all areas, so the solution could not generate organizational silos, which is why all Jira instances are integrated, with different methods depending on the need.

With the base architecture proposed, the critical phase for the success of this project began. Ravin Dhalani, CIO of MASMOVIL, defined it perfectly:

“We started the Jira redesign project with a technical perspective but discovered that this was a process project. That is where the TecnoFor team brought us the most value”.

The most critical part was in the processes related to customer service. MASMOVIL has always put a great focus on this matter, and with the exponential volume of clients the load was skyrocketing by the moment. Furthermore, when they buy a company they integrate it in record time, and during the project itself they expanded their activity to alarms, electricity or insurance, so we came across more than 300 different processes.

After more than a year of work by our team, with intense collaboration with dozens of professionals from MASMOVIL, those 300 became just 3 processes, integrating end-to-end flows with the systems of wholesale network providers.

We had simplified as much as possible without affecting the operation, which provided performance improvements at a technological level, but above all efficiency and scalability at a business level.

“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler”, según Einstein.

After this, the project continues, solving the multiple challenges that never cease to arise in a company like MASMOVIL:

  • Integration of support for internal users, portals for the group’s Business and Technology, with the design and implementation of SLAs.
  • Migration from other Jira to the new federated Jira ecosystem to the Innovation and Transformation teams, unifying UX and maintainability.
  • Design and implementation of a metadata layer that allows Grupo MASMOVIL to be autonomous in evolution, without affecting stability.
  • Jira integration with the rest of the common elements of the application map: user management, CMDB…
  • Support for the design of the Microservices architecture that integrates Jira with the rest of the applications, acquiring the possibility of replacing Jira with another tool if necessary.
  • Design, deployment and support of infrastructure and common services, to offer scalability, maintainability and collaboration between different processes and teams.
  • Design of the integration of alert management in Opsgenie in the support process.