Planview is helping eBay simplify, automate, and accelerate releases by replacing manual tools and improving team collaboration

Company eBay is an American multinational corporation and e-commerce company providing consumer-to-consumer and business-to-consumer sales services via the Internet. With over 162 million active buyers and 800 million live listings, eBay is a multibillion-dollar business, with operations in over 30 countries.

“The Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO) is the heart of eBay,” says Amit Bali, Lead Release Manager. The OCIO’s mission: Innovate and execute solutions which accelerate and support eBay’s global technology needs in a safe and stable corporate environment. “We are the gatekeepers of the production system,” adds Andras Vermes, Senior Manager, Quality and Release Services. “We support all the IT teams so they can move their projects and initiatives into production.”

Before Plutora (now Planview), eBay used SharePoint for almost three years. “We used a basic SharePoint form to capture data,” says Bali. “We couldn’t view environment conflicts, or see how releases impacted on systems.” “It was almost chaos,” says Vermes. “We used Excel to figure out our KPIs,” says Bali. “We used a lot of manual processes and it was time consuming and unproductive. Plutora gives eBay live metrics, and I can duplicate a new release from an old one and drastically reduce the work. That simply wasn’t possible with SharePoint, it was not the right tool.”

eBay offers Plutora to a wide user base, including Project Managers, Technical Leads, and support personnel.

“Plutora lets all our people use a single release management platform,” says Bali. “I make sure our IT teams are giving me everything I need to approve their releases and I reach out to IT teams every day. Plutora is good for IT team interaction. My 5 GB email inbox used to be flooded with emails, but now we use comments in Plutora instead.”

Plutora has streamlined the way eBay works. “Let’s say a release is coming,” says Bali. “All our IT teams are working on different activities. We use Plutora to give them the milestones, activities and criteria they need. This way, nothing becomes a bottleneck. We now have time to review, direct or guide IT teams to improve the quality of our releases.” “The adoption ratio has increased 300% in the last three months,” says Bali. “This shows the success of Plutora.”

Less Complexity

“With Plutora, everything is in one place. We have a full view of what we’re doing. We don’t need to go into multiple places and search for documents.” “I can save 50–70% of my time by looking at Plutora’s comments module instead of emails. It’s awesome.”

More Stability

“Providing a stable environment for our Internet employees is our ultimate goal. Using a proper release management process through Plutora, we have a more stable environment. All our IT teams can work more productively. That gives eBay the competitive advantage.”

Live Metrics and Reporting

“We are using Plutora metrics every day to ensure the IT team understands how much work has been done, where the conflict or pain points are that we have to resolve, and why we are having any failure on the way.” “Plutora reports are published across eBay for all CIO managers and VPs.”

Conflict Prevention

“Day-to-day, I use Plutora to go through releases and resolve any environment conflicts.”