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Why CU Boulder loves TaskRay

On Salesforce

The fact that TaskRay is native and compatible with other Salesforce functions and apps has enabled us to iterate faster.

Accountability

Since you can run reports about virtually anything in TaskRay within Salesforce, it helps us to stay accountable to ourselves, our stakeholders and our customer constituency.

Planning

With hundreds of tasks in our backlog, TaskRay is invaluable in terms of Sprint planning and project management.

An intuitive solution for agile project management

About CU Boulder

CU Boulder is one of 34 U.S. public research institutions belonging to the prestigious Association of American Universities (AAU). The university’s goal is to directly affect Colorado communities through collaborative research, innovation, and entrepreneurship.

CU’s Constituent Relationship Management (CRM) solution is built on Salesforce and is utilized by student advisors to facilitate student success.

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How CU Boulder Uses TaskRay

The CU Boulder CRM software development team has several hundred tasks in a backlog on 30-50 projects at any given time. They also need to be able to visualize work that spans multiple work streams.

CU Boulder uses TaskRay to manage two-week sprints based on a blended Agile Scrum approach. TaskRay helps them to keep the work organized and transparent at all times to contributors at the program and project levels.

When planning projects, their team goes into a room with two monitors. On the left monitor, they put up our sprint workbook with the user stories they’ve completed over the previous six sprints as well as goals for the next sprint and the 12-week view. On the right monitor, they put up TaskRay in Kanban view. They then look at the backlog and make sure their cards are groomed and consumable by the dev and business analysis teams. If someone needs to add a new task, they create it on the spot.

During a sprint, everyone on the team uses TaskRay to manage their own tasks and to log their time. Cross-collaboration is facilitated by Chatter, which helps them to quickly bring in the right people to help move a task forward.

Why TaskRay?

It was critical for CU Boulder to have a project management tool, like TaskRay, that was native to Salesforce since that’s the platform their CRM solution is built on. And as agile devs, they are big fans of Kanban boards but traditional physical boards were out. So the fact that TaskRay provides them with virtual Kanban boards was a big selling point. The Kanban view is a must in terms of the team being able to visualize their work queue. It also helps them communicate upstream—they’ve used TaskRay boards on more than one occasion to visually illustrate capacity problems to leadership. (The List view is utilized for viewing deadlines and tasks in an itemized way.)

They also like that with TaskRay it’s not an all or nothing scenario. Its filtering functionality allows us to control and customize views based on their specific needs. (The logic behind creating filters is very intuitive—a non-tech person can do it, no problem.) They’ve seen a noticeable improvement in work efficiency due to the use of filters.

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What project management tool(s) were used before TaskRay?

CU Boulder’s project management process was defined as their team was being assembled—they put TaskRay in place before many even came on board.

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Results

  • TaskRay has been a big help with velocity scoring and has helped to show how the CU Boulder team velocity has improved over time.
  • Time tracking has also been helpful— they can see what people are doing, in what time frame, and how much time they are using at a very granular level. This has helped them plan better for future sprints.
  • The team essentially serves as a consulting group within the University and TaskRay has helped to better serve their customer constituency by creating a common language.

I love my job as it allows me to guide, teach, and collaboratively spitball solutions with customers, ensuring they have the best experience possible with TaskRay and Salesforce.

Kyle Kirves Program & Projects Manager Constituent Relationship Management, CU Boulder