Hear Apnatomy Co-Founder, Jason White, talk with Atlassian Sales Director, Sean O'Sullivan about how Apnatomy brings agile experience from private sector into the public sector.
Sean O'Sullivan: Hello everyone. Thanks for joining us again today for our latest podcast where we will be discussing the art of scaling government agency workflow applications with Atlassian software. My name is Sean O'Sullivan, sales director of the Atlassian team here at Carahsoft, and I am joined today by Jason White. Jason is a co-founder of Apnatomy, an Atlassian professional services and Agile practice coaching solution partner. Thanks for joining us today, Jason.
Jason White: Thank you for having me.
Sean O'Sullivan: Happy to have you with us today as well. We know that as an Atlassian solution partner, Apnatomy serves as an expert with all things Atlassian, right? And with over 20 years of experience in this space, you have some indispensable knowledge when it comes to software evaluation and integration. At Carahsoft we're often receiving questions about how to develop DevOps strategy with Atlassian solutions, keeping in mind that they need to scale as their teams are growing. So let's discuss this for our listeners, Jason. Let me start by asking you a few questions. What do you hear from government customers and users about their current software solutions? Like, what are some of the biggest challenges that they are facing?
Jason White: Yeah. So when I'm dealing with government clients, one of the number one things we run into are homegrown systems. These systems were great in the past and they supported the organization, but they haven't supported growth. So as the organization scales and you have more processes and more solutions that are needed, more departments that are involved, those old systems kind of fall by the wayside and become very hard to maintain or integrate with newer technology. So that's one of the biggest challenges that we see when we first come into contact with some of our larger government clients, is they want to do a one-to-one match as they migrate off these old systems and onto new platforms. And it just seems like a very daunting task and it's like, how do they go about doing that while continuing to do their day jobs?
Sean O'Sullivan: Gotcha. So then in your experience, could you describe what you yourself are assisting with in the government space around adopting and implementing software applications to approve these efficiencies and scalability?
Jason White: Sure. So one of the things that I really bring in when I'm starting to meet with these clients is a lot of commercial experience. So, I've only actually been operating in the public sector for about the last four years with some large clients. Prior to that I had almost 16 years of commercial software development experience leading Agile teams, and we've really been bringing a lot of that expertise into our government clients as they have more Agile metrics that they need to hit on a regular basis. So then it's just a matter of working with them closely, educating them, understanding what their larger organizational goals are, and then building a plan to deliver that functionality for them.
Sean O'Sullivan: Gotcha. So you're bringing obviously that experience from the private sector into the public sector one, which obviously you know, they can be a bit ahead sometimes, I think. So, why would you say that that is so important? What are the benefits from translating that private experience over to the government?
Jason White: Well, I think in the private sector you have a lot of these methodologies and technologies that have been in place for years. They haven't always been on Atlassian tools, but you've always had things in place. Like there was project management, and then it was Agile project management, and then scaled. It's taken so many iterations over the years and where I'm finding a lot of the government clients are like, "Well, we know we should do Agile, but how do we go about doing that? What kind of tools can we use are the best practices to get started?" So it's kind of interesting between my commercial clients and my public sector clients, and seeing how they've matured at very different rates. And what I mean by that is I see a lot of the public sector clients maturing faster because they don't have the burden and the overhead of all these existing older methodologies that they're trying to maintain and migrate to do a hybrid approach.
They're just kind of like, "We want to do Agile and we want good tools to process from the get go on some of these projects or programs." And they're bought in and ready to take that path usually from day one. So it's a much cleaner and faster implementation. And then once they start seeing some success, it just takes off because then from there they're fully bought in as an organization. The team start liking the tools, all of the auditors are really liking the transparency and the reporting that they've never seen before on types of projects that we've been working on. And it's just been really beneficial for everyone involved.
Sean O'Sullivan: Gotcha. It's interesting, right? So, here at Carahsoft, we're talking to a lot of customers who... They use Atlassian solutions and they want to use it at a grand scale. And when they procure the solutions they kind of have a big question mark, right? When it comes to, "Hey, how do we use this with 500 users, a thousand users, et cetera?" So we know that a solution partner, Apnatomy, has been so instrumental in helping these federal agencies successfully scale applications to onboard hundreds of employees, maybe upwards of thousands, to use hundreds of software platforms in short periods of time, matters of months, which is incredibly, incredibly impressive. So can you maybe expand upon some of those details? What's the key to making this happen and helping these teams scale effectively?
Jason White: So one of the main things that I see in the public sector is, we talked a little bit about the Agile benchmarks and having better tools that are tightly integrated and the benefits of that. So what I usually see is more of a leadership body, and early on in the process, which trickles down to all of the teams and all the other groups within the project. So it's a much more standardized across the team approach when you start at the onset.
Now that differs wildly from the commercial clients that I've worked with in the past where it usually starts organically with a small team and then it spreads to another team. And through word of mouth it eventually grows into a larger solution. I see the government agencies really taking off faster because they're bought in from a leadership level down, and they can kind of enforce that process and really roll it out rapidly. But when you bring in someone like a solution partner like myself, we're able to work with those leadership teams, understand those goals, and then develop a plan to, "How fast do you need to onboard this? How fast do you want to scale it?" And we bring in all the expertise needed to do that, including people to train and onboard all of those users into those applications.
Sean O'Sullivan: Got it. Thanks Jason. So there's probably a lot more that we could discuss here, right? So I think there's a lot more information that folks need to do some research on and learn more about. So do you just have any quick suggestions now about where listeners can go to start learning more, at least about what right Apnatomy can do, how they're going to help these scaling practices, and how they're supporting government agencies?
Jason White: Sure. So you go to apnatomy.com, you can look me up on LinkedIn, Jason White, Apnatomy co-founder. You can also... A great place to go is, and this is where my background is with starting the user group here in Nashville, Tennessee, many years ago, go get involved in the community that is Atlassian. Go find a user group, attended an event, start that networking within the community. You'll find that people are really open with sharing all of that information. The Atlassian website is a wealth of knowledge. They have all kinds of free resources and playbooks available to teams that want to get started on these tools and these types of processes. You could run those plays, you can find out what best practices are for ITSM or DevOps. It's all out there. It's all available, and I highly recommend it to any organization that is wanting to get started with the tools or even have had the tools for a while and want to mature their processes.
Sean O'Sullivan: No, that's actually some great suggestions, Jason. I think folks don't necessarily realize, but literally get on Google, check out Atlassian User Groups. We've done the research, they're all over the country and really a great collection of users and a really great way to share tips, advice on some of those applications and whatnot, and just how to better efficiently use the products. So yeah, those are all great. Thank you so much.
We really appreciate your time today, Jason. This is a great valuable insight. Like I said, I think we can discuss a lot more about scaling, so I think this is just the beginning of our conversation, but I definitely recommend for our listeners that they need to check out Jason's suggestions, going to apnatomy.com, that's Apnatomy with one P, and as well as resources on this podcast landing page. You can give the Carahsoft team a shout at any time at atlassian@carahsoft.com, or give us a shout, 833-547-2468. And thanks again for your time, Jason. Really appreciate it. This is some great stuff.
Jason White: Thanks for having me. I'm always happy to share this knowledge with anyone that wants to sit down and talk shop.
Sean O'Sullivan: Awesome. Thanks everyone. Appreciate it.