Planview replaced inefficient spreadsheets at Service NSW with a single source of truth for releases that is available 24/7/365

Service NSW is an award-winning initiative of the New South Wales state government of Australia. Service NSW delivers more than 800 government transactions, including vehicle registrations and birth certificates, through one digital service, one phone number, and a network of one-stop shops. “We own the customer experience between the state government and the taxpayers,” says Jarrod Roberts, Release and Environment Manager. “NSW state government has separate offices and phone numbers for 168 government agencies, including Roads, Maritime and Fair Trading. We are working to create a single point of contact.” Currently, Service NSW has 3 fully integrated release environments, with a major release and a testing cycle for each environment every month. More government agencies are being added all the time. “We will be connecting another 3 agencies to our system next month,” says Roberts.

Creating a single point of contact for the NSW state government was a huge challenge. “The government agencies have high expectations and an increasing list of requirements,” says Roberts. “They don’t understand how long major releases take.” Service NSW was aware of the challenges to come. “We planned everything in advance. We knew we needed to get ourselves off the ground as quickly as we could,” says Roberts. Service NSW considered 3 competitors before deciding that Plutora was the best solution. “None of the competitors fitted our needs. They were too restrictive and didn’t fit with my plans,” says Roberts.

Service NSW were keen to ensure best practice, so they chose Plutora (now Planview). “We were setting up from scratch and we organized ourselves,” says Roberts. “I already knew what I needed in regards to enterprise release management and we wanted to be as close to best practice as we could get.” Service NSW is happy with their decision. “Managers get to approve changes. Architects can confirm that the development taking place is what they originally anticipated or planned,” says Roberts.

Plutora has made Service NSW highly productive. “We are pumping out a major release every month until at least August,” says Roberts. “We perform user acceptance testing and we plan to move towards combined acceptance testing. They are booked within the same environment.”

Plutora has freed Service NSW from requiring inefficient spreadsheets and emails to manage their environments. As a Cloud-based ‘Software as a Service’ (SaaS) solution, Plutora has given Service NSW a single, up-to-date source of truth for releases, deployment plans and test environments that is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. “Success for our team is delivery,” says Roberts. “It’s always about delivery. Deliver as quickly as you can and as much as you can. We are delivering faster with Plutora than we would with any similar priced software.”