Did you know? Prodly has work management integration! Join Scott and Jenn to see how you can integrate Jira, Azure Boards, and other work management apps with your DevOps solution to you always have a record of the what, when, why, and who of a deployment. Watch all the way to the end to see a demo of linking your Prodly deployment to a work item in Jira.

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Transcript:

Scott (00:14.763)

Welcome back to the third edition of Prodly: Did you know? Very excited to bring you more information around Prodly has work management integration. Again, I am your co -host, Scott Teeple. Here with me is Jen, our wonderful Jen who knows everything about Prodly. So it's great to have her on the channel. So yeah, I think we'll dive right in here if I can get this worked out. I don't think much introductions. I've been with Prodly now for coming up on two years now. Jen, you've been a little bit longer, worked in support. So obviously if any questions from the webinar, please don't hesitate to reach out to us.

So as we talk about, Prodly has work management integrations. So you trust Prodly for your CPQ data. Prodly does so much more. And I think that's what this channel, this message is really all about. Because you trust us as a single tool for your ALM, tech stack consolidation. But as we dive in a little bit deeper into workforce management, Jen, what's the purpose of integrating a work management system with a tool like Prodly?

Jenn (01:26.863)

Yeah, sure. So it's really around kind of tracking and organizing. So, you know, when you think about these work management systems that you work with, and by that we're referring to, you know, your Jira, Azure boards, this kind of thing. But those tools are all there to help you and your team manage your workload and, you know, prioritize what needs to come out, what needs to be fixed. And so when you're making those changes with Prodly, it's helpful to be able to link to the original work item. 

So, you your stories, your bugs, your tasks. Essentially, these are going to lead to some form of a deployment, right? So when you do that deployment, you're able to then link your work items to the deployment. So you can always clearly see why the deployment was initiated to begin with. And then, of course, we come around on the back again where we're able to then use those work items when you're using Prodly to monitor the changes in your environment. And we can kind of talk about a little later.

Scott (02:27.935)

Yeah, and in a lot of ways, right? Like the whole reason why you have a work management system is the document, the work that's actually getting done, right? So in… I think at the end of the day, that work is typically being done, could be manually, but the hope is that you're definitely bringing that documentation back to once the ticket is worked, that it gets closed out and dispositioned. And I think you just kind of hit on the next question that we were gonna kind of go over, which is, know, Prodly now integrates with all of these work management systems. What systems does Prodly integrate with?

Jenn (03:03.793)

Yeah, so we integrate with Jira, Asana, GitHub issues and Azure boards right now. I think I got them all, but we'll also be able to take a look at the full list later in our demo as well.

Scott (03:19.371)

Yeah, what's the reason why Prodly is integrating with so many work management systems? Why not just one?

Jenn (03:25.485)

Well, we listen to our customers, and all of our customers use different work management tools. You know, we kind of rolled it out. I think it was Jira and the Azure side, and then, you know, we had some requests come in to support some other work management integrations. So we went and built those for our customers.

Scott (03:43.935)

Yeah, that is the right answer. So thanks for that, Jen. So when you think about the basics of a work management integration tool, right? So, and again, this is part of this channel that we have here is to really kind of break down when you think about what it means to have work management, Jen. Tell us a little bit about some of the functionality that we have that our customers and prospects can look forward to having when they integrate with the work management.

Jenn (04:10.845)

Sure, so I mean we can look at the list here. This really is referring to kind of the basics of a work management integration. But when we look at some of these points here, you know, when it comes to like linking issues, that's kind of the main idea here, right? Is that you're actually able to physically link your issues to your deployments. And then, you know, we have controls around like the permissions, things like this, so you can control who can view what. And then we also have the ability to run reports on those changes based on the work items that are linked, as well as filtering and searching for different work items, and of course this is scalable and flexible as well.

Scott (04:51.883)

Yeah, and I know that we get really excited and maybe I'm jumping the gun here a little bit, but I do get excited when we talk about work management integration. It's not just, at least in our vision, isn't just in the simple documentation of the work that's getting done, but how do you bring that work forward, right, into probably, or into your work management system to be able to accelerate the work that actually needs to get done? Like scratch org creations within your work management system. Could you imagine a world where you have a button and your work management where you can have those environments automatically created by the push of a button? That's the vision that we're really bringing, I think, to change this landscape around how work management integration means, not just within the basics that you see on the screen.

Scott (05:42.839)

Sorry, missed my slide button there. All right, so now the customer stories. When you think about work management, we have conversations with customers. I think some of the questions is, how does that integration work?

Jenn (05:57.157)

Yeah, so pretty straightforward to set up, right? You get in there, you're to use your URL to your work management system, your personal access token, or you can connect with OAuth as well to certain integrations. But essentially, you set up that connection between your work management integration and Prodly. And then we do have an option to make it required, which I think if you're really trying to enforce a process, that's probably the way to go. So if you do make it required that you need to link a work item to your in order to submit the deployment, any users that are going to submit a deployment without linking their work item first, they're actually going to not be able to submit it. So that's optional, the required part. But once you get it set up, really straightforward to set up, and then it's really just a matter of searching for your tickets based on the description or the issue number. You, of course, can also see the statuses of those tickets in Prodly as well. But you go and you actually link those to your deployment. And then, of course, if you ever need to modify that, let's say link the wrong one, you can adjust that if needed. And you're always able to see those linked work items when you're looking at your deployment results. So that's really easy for someone who wants to go and verify, I see a deployment in here, but why? Why did we run this deployment? And that's kind of what we say a lot, right? Like that—this is the why piece. It's like you're telling us why are you actually running this deployment? What does it link back to? What are you hoping to achieve? What task are you trying to close, let's say.

Scott (07:25.643)

Yeah, and we know that there's kind of two steps within how it works, right? The Prodly side, which is what you just kind of described. But we do have, and I think leading into the next question, right, in this two-way integration, that there is a little bit of a setup that your work management tool may be able to need to be able to install the Prodly side of our app. So I guess what's the importance of an integration that is on both ends in two ways between Prodly and your work management system?

Jenn (07:57.717)

When we talk about this kind bidirectional relationship, we're really referring to, and let's just take an example, like let's say Jira, for example. You have your tasks and your stories and your bugs that exist in Jira. And then you're going and running deployments and you're linking your Jira tickets to the deployment. So when you're actually in Prodly, you can see your Jira, you can reference Jira. But when we talk about the bidirectional, we're talking about that integration existing on both ends. So when you're actually in Jira, you can then go and see those linked deployments. So that's really helpful where I think of like a release manager or someone who's gonna want to be checking up to see that those deployments are done, the work is done that's tied to the work item. So they are always in Jira. They might not be spending that much time in Prodly. So in that case, it might be beneficial for them to be able to see that information from there and quickly reference the deployments that were related to that work item. So having it on both. Being able to access Prodly from Jira and able to access Jira from Prodly. And I should mention this is the bidirectional relationship right now. We have it for Jira. We also have it for Azure boards. And I believe we're going be adding it soon for GitHub issues as well.

Scott (09:08.779)

Yeah, many, many more to come. So if you're a customer and it's something that you're really looking for and you need, please reach out to Jen and I. We'll definitely have some conversations with our engineering and product team on your behalf to make sure. But you just dipped into, I think, one of the major benefits of having this integration, right? When you think about, as a release manager working with your day-to-day, maybe in your Jira or your Azure boards, and being able to very quickly see the disposition of that ticket and the work that is actually done. Other benefits that come to mind when you think about having this work management system in place?

Jenn (09:44.229)

Yeah, and it kind of ties into the next point as well is kind of that piece around monitoring. So again, we have, you can see from Jira, you can see your deployments and vice versa. But then we also have a monitoring piece that allows you to actually run reports based on the work item. So, you know, you can actually go in there and see what changes were made to your data, like your actual record on the record level. You can see exactly what changes were made and how those changes tie back to the work item, you can clearly see from there as well.

Scott (10:17.973)

Yeah, this is really near and dear to my heart, right? When you think about tying the what to the why to the who to the when, right? When you think about what it takes to pass an audit, coming from kind of the IT healthcare space and the previous roles, being directly involved in some of these really horrible—I mean wonderful—experiences of trying to satisfy compliance and audit. It can really be a time suck when you think about all of the documentation and all the work that has to go into to prove that you're doing what you say that you're supposed to be doing, right? So having kind of this ability to have a one click, one touch kind of report that brings, again, not only the documentation that you've already done within your work management system, but then tying that to exactly who did it, when they did it, so that way you have a full story to be able to take that back to your auditors and say, hey look, this is what we've done and I don't have to spend four, five, six, seven hours with a whole project team sitting there saying, okay, why did we this change? What was the documentation? What was the ticket that we did it? So it really brings that kind of all together into a single package.

All right, so I think this just launches into maybe a real quick demo. So I will stop sharing my screen here and let Jen take it over and give a little bit of a demo.

Jenn (11:42.781)

Here we go.

So to access the integrations, you'll want to come, of course, to the release tab, but then also go over to settings here. And then you can hop using the navigation here to the integrations. This is where you're going to see everything we have available for you to connect to. So if you guys are looking to use Jira, you'll select Jira. When you hit connect, it's just a wizard that will pop up. Again, very straightforward. It's going to show you, you know, add your project URL, add your personal access token, your email. Now once it's connected, that's when you will see something more like this and you'll have a link to your work management tool. So this is where you can mark it as required as well. So I'll just go ahead and put that as required for now. So once I have this set up, and again I'm connected here to my Jira account where my actual tickets are going to live. So when I come in here and I'm ready to run a deployment, we'll just set this up.

Let's say I'm just going to deploy some data today.

Jenn (12:53.201)

So I'm gonna just try to deploy this without actually adding my work item just to show.

Jenn (13:10.021)

Right, so we're getting a message up at the top just letting us know that we need to go and link that work item if we want to submit the deployment. So that's when we can come in here. And now this is where you're going to search for your work item. So for example, I can search by the ticket number. I happen to know the number I'm looking for. I can also see the status. So right now it's in to do. I can see the name and the label and the actual number that relates to it. So once I've linked that, that's when I can go ahead and submit my deployment. And so this is an example of linking a work item to a deployment that you're submitting. But then of course you also have the ability to modify that. So let's say I just submitted this deployment, but I realized that that's actually not the one I wanted to include. In that case, I can always come in and just modify it. So come in here, remove this epic, and then come back in and add the other one that I meant to add originally. And of course you can also add multiple tickets.

So let's just say that a single deployment relates to multiple tickets. You can go ahead and save those changes. And again, those will stay there in the results for you to clearly see whenever you need it. So once you open up a deployment result, you'll have those linked work items at the top. But then of course, since we're deploying with Jira today, I can show you guys the bi-directional relationship. So this does take a couple steps on the Jira side just to set it up. Pretty straightforward. You have to set up a custom field. Again, we have documentation around it, but once you set it up, it will look something like this. So you'll see this extra section here with the Prodly-Jira integration. And this is where you can actually see all the deployments that have been linked to this work item. So that's nice and clear for you to determine what's been linked to this work item. And then if you ever want to actually deploy this, you could come and hit Deploy This Issue, but no fears here. Your users are still gonna be restricted by their access in Prodly.

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That question comes up a lot, so I just want to make sure. Really, all that button does is just takes you back to Prodly where you can then go and submit your deployment. So if your users don't have access to that, they still won't be able to do so.

Scott (15:24.364)

Well, that is perfect. All right, let me, if you want to stop sharing your screen and then I will go back to sharing mine.

Scott (15:40.631)

Alright, thanks Jen, that was a great demo. And again, I think as you're getting in and wondering more about it, or if you have, probably, and you currently don't have it, please don't hesitate to reach out to Jen and I as we are kind of your point of contact going forward. But again, I think the tagline here is you trust us for your data.

We do so much more than just CPQ migration data. So it's time to take a look at us, know, look at us again. And if you're a prospect, please click on the link and let's get you a demo and get you set up to start doing it the right way. Thank you everyone. Thanks, Jen.

Jenn (16:18.823)

Thank you.

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