Mollie optimises their Jira solution to support future growth and improve collaboration

About Mollie

Mollie is a pioneer in the payments industry and one of Europe’s fastest-growing financial service providers. Founded in 2004, the firm facilitates companies of all sizes to scale and grow with an easy-to-use payments API that offers multiple payment methods. Mollie’s mission is to simplify complex financial services to become the world’s most loved payment service providers.

Mollie’s platform allows businesses to accept payments through various channels, including credit cards, bank transfers, and popular digital wallets such as PayPal and Apple Pay. With a focus on user experience and technology, they offer a seamless payment experience for both businesses and their customers. They have also established partnerships with leading e-commerce platforms such as Shopify and WooCommerce, making it a popular choice among online businesses.

With a customer base of over 135,000 in Europe and an international team consisting of more than 750 employees, Mollie operates offices in Amsterdam, Ghent, Lisbon, London, Maastricht, Munich, and Paris.

The challenges

Mollie faced very specific challenges and had a clear problem statement. Their primary objective was to improve collaboration across different teams and with external partners, while ensuring visibility and transparency in their work. Since they were already using Jira, our focus was not on implementation or setup, but rather on enhancing their efficiency and facilitating collaboration.

Expertise

As Mollie was growing, the solution they were using also needed to scale up and be future-ready. Although they were capable of handling the scale up internally, their Business IT team was occupied and they required external expertise for advice and recommendations on the necessary steps to take.

Collaboration with partners

Mollie collaborates with numerous Integration Partners. These are organizations that agree to integrate their product or services with Mollie. Integration Managers from Mollie work closely with teams from these Integration Partners to ensure smooth cooperation and implementation. As the number of partners is expected to grow in the coming future, it is important for Mollie to offer its services on one platform.

Developers from Mollie’s Integration Partners used to work in their own tools. This led to limited visibility for Mollie, as their communication was restricted to update calls, meetings, emails, and messages. In cases where urgent attention or collaboration from another Mollie team was required, getting help in time was challenging.

Consistency

Previously, Mollie’s Integration Managers, support team, and external partners had been using workarounds such as Excel sheets, email summaries, and, in some cases, partner’s Jira boards to manage these tasks on a daily basis. However, this approach led to no consistency in their work.

Security

With all the Integration Partners and work that needed to be done for each partner, security of the platform was a prime factor in considering a Jira implementation. While the security of the previous platform was fine, the primary motive behind adopting a Jira solution was to prevent partners from accessing each other’s work and projects.

The solution

Devoteam aimed to improve the efficiency of Mollie’s Integration Managers’ work by defining the necessary information and standardizing the incoming work process. Additionally, they needed a reliable release tracking system to monitor their progress and identify potential delays that could cause them to miss the release date. By doing so, they would be able to determine whether additional resources were required to meet the deadline. This also helped to maintain consistency in the long term.

On top of that, Mollie had some challenges regarding the security and access of partners. They wanted to prevent partners from accessing each other’s work and projects. With Jira, Devoteam was able to separate partners into groups and give them different ‘roles’ in their own projects (role-based access control). Access to projects will be restricted to each individual’s designated role, meaning one cannot view other projects unless granted permission through their assigned role (need-to-know basis).

A two-phase solution

Devoteam devised a two-phase solution to tackle Mollie’s challenges and implement the solutions effectively. Phase 1 was to create a blueprint template for Partner projects and phase 2 was to automate ticket creation in Partner projects. We divided the implementation into two phases to ‘Inspect and Adapt’ our approach. If the template needed modifications, it would be quicker and easier to do it before the automation phase . On top of that, it is a great way to see if the actual users are willing to use the projects that were built for them. If it needed updates we could do it right then and there. This solution addressed Mollie’s concerns and provided the necessary tools to streamline their task management process.

Phase 1

Phase 1 aimed to establish a template that could be used as a foundation for several Partner projects. The use of a template results in standardizing the work process and maintaining consistency throughout partner projects.

In this phase, Devoteam developed a blueprint template to gain insight into the complex structure of Mollie and its Integration Partner teams, identify the workload, define the different stages of tasks, and the nature of the work carried out by the Integration Managers. This also involved gaining insight into the following points:

• What information got captured in the system (types of tickets, fields and different custom fields);
• How work flows through different states (workflow);
• Which information is necessary at what state (screens and screen schemes);
• Different levels of security, Issue Security and role-based access control (RBAC) for Partner teams.

Once everything was done and tested, Devoteam created different Partner projects with consistency for teams to actually start using it.

Phase 2

The focus in phase 2 was on automating ticket creation with proper hierarchy in Partner projects, which used the templates created in phase 1. The goal of this phase was to eliminate the need for manual creation of tickets, thereby reducing the risks of errors and improving efficiency.

In collaboration with Integration Managers, we started the process of identifying the various types of tasks that must consistently be present in different work items. This included creating epics till subtasks and linking all the work items to provide a portfolio level view of the work that needed to be done.

We also worked on distributing this work towards our Partner teams, while keeping agility at the center with changing priorities. To ensure a single source of truth, we continued to rely on epics and Jira to track progress. Finally, we gained valuable insights by utilizing Dashboards and Roadmaps to better understand project status and anticipate potential issues.

The benefits

Benefits for Mollie

The solutions Devoteam implemented for Mollie had benefits beyond just making their teams happy. By creating a generic blueprint template for managing projects, we essentially created a universal language that both our Integration Managers and Integration Partner teams could speak. This improved communication and collaboration across the board.

Furthermore, any future enhancements to this template could be implemented in a single place, ensuring consistency across all projects and making their system future-ready. As the template is ready, it can be used for as many projects needed, with the same underlying aspects (issues, workflows, fields, statuses, priority lists, security etc.). Therefore, scaling this solution to 50 or even 100 more projects would be easier and more effective with less hassle. Additionally, automation rules could be easily scaled up in a similar way, with consistency across the entire system.

In collaboration with Mollie’s Integration Managers, UX/Content Design team, and Corporate/Business IT team, this solution standardized the development and release of Integration Partners. By establishing a top standard for quality, we were able to reduce the likelihood of human error during the delivery process. This also eliminated the need for copy or pasting from one system or tool to another, further streamlining the process. Overall, our new project management solution has brought numerous benefits and has set them up for success in the future.

Benefits for the Integration Partner teams

With the implementation of this solution, up-to-date information was readily and immediately available, eliminating the need for email summaries and bulky excel sheets. This resulted in reduced turn-around times and more efficient solutioning processes.