Electric Wind Power Group: Project Management Informatization

Electric Wind Power Group (EWPG) is located in Shanghai and has about 13,000 employees. EWPG is a world-class high-end equipment manufacturer, focusing on smart energy, intelligent manufacturing and smart infrastructure to provide green and intelligent industrial-grade system solutions. They have a global presence in industries such as new energy, efficient clean energy, industrial automation and environmental protection. As a leading industrial brand in China, EWPG is committed to high-quality development, and has been a pioneer domestically and internationally for more than a century. It is ranked one of China’s top 500 companies by Fortune.

EWPG’s R&D department in Shanghai has over 100 people, plus the R&D staff in other cities, and the entire R&D team has 300 employees. Wex d’Perrot, the Product Manager from the Shanghai R&D Center, was thrilled to share their team’s journey on ZenTao with us today.

“ We focus on Research Projects for wind power, and traditional embedded (PLC controller) program development. Our development team is quite large and it is actually very difficult to control the whole project,” said Wex, “ Our team, from the beginning of the product requirements, is managed through Excel sheets, the development phase and test feedback phase are also managed through Excel tables.”

Wex told us with a forced smile, “ For a company with +10,000 employees and a R&D team of 300+, can you imagine that the whole project process is still managed with Excel sheets?” “ So, our original requirement is to put more product hardware into the system with the concept of Agile, so that we can control the process and progress of software development.”

Jocent is a senior Sales Manager of ZenTao. He told us that the team of Wex used the free open source version of ZenTao at the beginning, but many colleagues had some trouble using it. And they also had some special requirements, such as exporting bugs and tasks in the excel sheet, and jumping links to the tasks or bugs, so that people can jump to ZenTao directly by clicking the links in the excel sheet. All these required ZenTao’s R&D team to provide customized services for customers. Finally, through the effort of Jocent’s team, they implemented report statistics customization and test report export for the customers.

Wex became good friends with Jocent after several contacts, saying, “ I am very grateful to Jocent’s team for deploying ZenTao Max trial for us. At first we didn’t know how to use it better, but Jocent organized 4 offline technical sessions, 5 online sessions for us. He also shared us ZenTao Open Class videos, ZenTao manuals, etc., and eventually all the testing departments in our company gradually started and used ZenTao.”

Of course, Wex’s team also contacted Jira and Easytrack to search for project management software. However, if they chose Jira, they would have to purchase a lot of additional plugins to meet the team’s needs, which would be a waste of resources and time for a large R&D testing team. And the features of Easytrack are too simple and can not satisfy their requirements. So, after careful consideration, they finally picked ZenTao!

The most important reason that made the team led by Wex choose ZenTao is: “ZenTao can integrate with Gitlab to realize enterprise-level open source DevOps solutions, which is very important to us.”

By deploying ZenTao Max, Wex’s team has complete support the whole process of agile development and enhanced the project requirements matrix.

1. Powerful Functions

• Through the private control of programs, products, and projects, the data of different subsidiaries are independent of each other;
• Message notification mechanism: through the integration of chat software such as Dingding, users can be notified immediately;
• Covering the company’s strategic management level with a built-in program to support the management of multi-level projects. All accounts are imported through LDAP and connected to the domain controller of the head office;
• Cost-effective: private deployment, unlimited number of users; iterative update, providing professional technical support;
• Support Gantt chart, Kanban, work log, calendar, statistics, source code integration;
• Strict access control, flexible and safe way.

2. Powerful Product Management System

Wex said, “ From product planning to product release, our team can completely cover the core process and lifecycle management of our R&D projects by breaking down requirements, tasks, defects and use cases through ZenTao”. Wex added that “By rough estimation, ZenTao can improve product iteration cycle by 50%, reduce labor hours by 20%, and speed up the processing of software bugs by 100% !”

In addition, Léo Li, manager of the testing department from Electric Wind Power Group, told us by phone: “ The work hours spent by testers on documentation and use case writing have been significantly reduced. All test items are transparently and can be tracked online in real time.” In addition, “ through ZenTao’s standardized product and project management processes, achieving the clear story management, real-time task tracking and efficient team collaboration, which can effectively improve project quality.”

3. Agile & Flexible

ZenTao supports agile methods and scrum models. After getting in touch with Wex’s team, the development team of ZenTao added documentation management, release management, operation and maintenance, feedback, office, and other functions to their team, so the operation and maintenance team of EWPG can also use the ZenTao tool. After that, Jean, the IT department manager, put forward custom requirements, then the custom workflow, custom forms, and other more comprehensive support were added.

Wex, the product manager, said: “ For the management, through the visualization of the project management process and results, the entire process and results can be seen at a glance, so that the management level can better control the progress of the project. Through the Kanban, every member of the team can access the execution details of each iteration, reducing unnecessary meeting time.”

Finally, summarizing the case of Wex’s team, we can see that for large-scale R&D project management, ZenTao can achieve the iterative acceleration of products by controlling the project management process and finally achieve controllable delivery quality. It eliminates time and resource waste and increases efficiency by reducing costs.