cPrime, an ALTEN Company, is a full-service consultancy that helps companies deliver the extraordinary through consulting, managed services and custom solutions for thousands of software teams, including more than half of the Fortune 100. cPrime is a leader in Agile/Scrum transformation services, an Atlassian Platinum Solution/Enterprise Partner + Atlassian Verified Vendor, and a respected DevOps solution provider.


Red-hot digital advertising firm, The Trade Desk, had proven their expertise in automating online ad buying, but by 2015 its infrastructure couldn’t keep up. The company couldn’t qualify, hire, or onboard new employees fast enough to keep up with its scorching pace of growth.

Founded in 2009, The Trade Desk is a self-service platform for ad buyers to bid on and purchase digital ads using automated technology. Based in Ventura, California, it has 19 office locations and customers that span the globe.

In 2016 The Trade Desk went public in one of the year’s most successful IPOs according to The Wall Street Journal and Business Insider, whose analysts predicted that its valuation would exceed $1 billion.

The automation secret

The secret to The Trade Desk’s success? Automation. In their work helping ad agencies place millions of online ads each day, they built a sophisticated automation engine to find the best placements and prices. And once their company began to grow, they turned to automation to help them solve their HR pain points.

In 2015 The Trade Desk brought in cPrime for a fast deployment of Jira Service Desk to help HR and other departments collaborate more effectively. Jira Service Desk automated repetitive tasks in the hiring and onboarding process and also brought standardization and clarity to human resources and other newly connected service delivery teams. The Trade Desk now has over 125 service agents, and 700+ active employees in Jira Service Desk.

“Prior to Jira Service Desk, the Trade Desk teams used separate tools to manage work tasks and issues, requests, communications, and transactions,” said Drew West, senior director, global support and business intelligence at The Trade Desk. “The interface between these teams and systems was primarily email and Skype – which were not transparent, traceable or reportable.”

Jira Service Desk resolves pain points

“While growing fast, we were experiencing three pain points in our internal workflow,” said West. “We’re committed to automation at the Trade Desk, and we deployed Jira Service Desk to help us deal with these pain points, fragmentation, traceability, and analytics.”

Fragmentation

Disparate applications challenged process continuity and organizational scalability. Email, support ticketing, and product management systems were separate and not tightly integrated.

In the cPrime implementation, Jira Service Desk brings every participant in the onboarding process into a central tool, where they can work together on a single version of an HR request  – eliminating organizational and process fragmentation.

Traceability

Lack of streamlining challenged visibility and accountability. There was no single location to see the entire picture related to an issue. Email related requests had no clear accountability or ownership. Often many team members were addressed or copied on an issue message with no primary issue owner. Email volumes continued to increase, causing email fatigue and compounding ownership challenges.

With Jira Service Desk, requests and issues have complete traceability and the issue ownership chain, and accountability, are maintained. The system automatically guides the service agent to resolution of each issue, with automated reporting to interested teams or partners. Jira Service Desk automatically sends a bug issue, for example, to Engineering to resolve, and saves a record of the request.

Analytics

A lack of standardization challenged objective understanding and the company’s decision-making ability. The existing systems were incapable of providing a comprehensive view of activity, issues, capacity demand and challenges. Management lacked sufficient data that could be analyzed for improvement opportunities.

Jira Service Desk automates data collection and analysis, automatically reporting status, volume, types of requests and other data. With automated data mining, The Trade Desk can evaluate the volume of requests for hardware or software access that come into Human Resources, and the average time it takes to resolve each request.

Customer satisfaction grows to 99%

cPrime’s deployment of Jira Service Desk was successful and The Trade Desk immediately realized its benefits. Before the deployment of Jira Service Desk, Trade Desk customer satisfaction ratings were averaging below 60%. After the deployment, customer satisfaction scores have not fallen below 99%.

“The cPrime delivery team and Trade Desk SMEs worked closely together as one Scrum team with iterative delivery and an agile mindset,” said Swati Jain, vice president, professional services at cPrime. “cPrime brought the solution and technical leadership, and demonstrated working progress every week so it could solicit feedback early on. This also helped get buy-in from different groups at The Trade Desk throughout the engagement.”

As a leading Atlassian Solution partner, cPrime brings breadth and depth of product expertise to the entire solution stack. With its process-oriented approach, cPrime helps its client re-engineer and streamline their processes on the Atlassian tools to drive improved collaboration and efficiencies. Learn more about cPrime.

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How one ad-tech firm automated their hiring and onboarding with Jira Service Desk