How DiMenco Scaled R&D With Helix Plan (Formerly Hansoft)
After moving from Microsoft Project to Helix Plan (formerly Hansoft), DiMenco, a creator of innovative 3-D technology, gained the cross-project transparency their research and development teams needed to reduce product delays.
Why Helix Plan?
Planning Overview
With a single shared backlog, they were able to improve transparency and reduce bottlenecks.
Real-Time Collaboration
Team members can now handle consequences of delay as they occur.
Stability
With past experience with buggy tools, DiMenco wanted a more stable solution.
Compared to the buggy systems I have used in the past, [Helix Plan] is a tool I can trust every day.”
What DiMenco Develops
Dimenco’s story began in 2004, when a group of people at Phillips started developing a 3-D experience without glasses. Their department restructured into its own company in 2010. Today, Dimenco is a growing, flexible high-tech company with an influx of new projects.
Dimenco’s 3-D technology allows you to see a customizable 3-D image from anywhere in a room, without requiring cumbersome, inconvenient 3-D glasses. The technology itself is an overlay to a common LCD screen. The R&D department at DiMenco consists of a wide range of competencies, spanning both hardware and software: chemistry, physics, manufacturing, software algorithms, eye tracking, and FPGA development.
Balancing Research & Projects
At DiMenco, teams invest roughly 80% of their time on research topics. The remaining 20% is used to make product demonstrators for customers. As demand rises, so does the importance to balance research and customer projects.
A typical customer project touches everyone in the R&D organization. Planning is a critical activity that ensures promises to customers are fulfilled on time. The output of one person’s work becomes the direct input to another person’s work. So the plan becomes a key artifact to ensure that capabilities in the organization are optimized.
With transparency from Helix Plan’s planning view, everyone can see the organization’s complete plan — and can just as easily find their own work. It not only helps everyone on the team understand what needs to be done, but it also fosters healthy discussions about what should change in their fast-paced environment.
"The structure and overview we get for all of our projects quickly paid off our investment in [Helix Plan].”
Scaling Up With Helix Plan
Dimenco was first introduced to Helix Plan through a customer’s project. Their customer was using Helix Plan for enterprise Agile planning, and Dimenco was one of many stakeholders feeding data into their large plan. Today, everyone at DiMenco has a Helix Plan seat, and can easily access their schedules to see what to work on next, as well as all details around the tasks.
Direct benefits of switching to Helix Plan include:
Fewer Bottlenecks — Each person can understand the consequence of delay. Particularly for bottlenecked resources, Helix Plan gives an unprecedented overview.
Better Awareness — Raised awareness around tasks helps teams quickly discover missing information, what is going on, and what needs to happen.
Speed & Accessibility — With Helix Plan, the plan is directly accessible to everyone at their desks for fast status updates. With their previous solutions, the plan was a simple file, accessible only by one person in the organization at a time.
‘A Tool I Can Trust Every Day’
By sharing a single product backlog in Helix Plan, teams at DiMenco have significantly more visibility across projects. They’re able to react to change in real-time and collaborate to reduce consequences of product delays.
Finally, they have a tool they can rely on.
"I am impressed with the stability of Helix Plan. Compared to the buggy systems I have used in the past, [Helix Plan] is a tool I can trust every day,” says Pieter de Jong, Manager of the Image Processing Group.
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