📊 Freedom from daily tracking and reporting

1. **Weekends are not for ideation and deep work: “**I work on weekends because I am not able to make time during weekdays for ideation and problem discovery.” After 8 weeks of integrating Sparkz standup, retrospective, and Jira check-in features into the workflow we got on call with the senior manager who said the above. He reported that he saved 2 hours on average in meeting time a day which allows him to get that 4 hour deep work session on most work days.

2. Automated Activity Collection and Status Updates: The team now automatically gathers updates from Jira and other tools, presenting a comprehensive report during daily standups. Instead of detailed messages and sudden syncs-team members provide quick status updates, ensuring alignment on task completion and priorities.

What it really means:

• Only 3 hours per week (per dev) and 2.5 hours per week (per PM) spent for tracking and reporting than the earlier 10-12 hours spent on standups and issue meets.
• Reduced the frequency of sudden sync meets (huddles in case of Refrens) from 3/day to less than 1/day for team members.

⛔ Creating weekly reports and gauging team insights on autopilot

Project Management, more like Progress Management: Both product and engineering leaders track tasks regularly but the best ones we know track logs. Refrens told us they like a lean team and it’s important for any lean team leads to assess every member’s contribution. Sparkz provided them a clear no b.s log of each team member's contributions.

Work will report itself: The Reports dashboard provides a complete overview of all check-in answers and associated Jira issues. All managers and devs reported positively on how they can monitor the status of tasks and identify bottlenecks at their fingertips to complete projects even before deadlines. While team leads reported more objective and metrics-driven performance reviews allowing them to create personalized and realistic roadmaps for each project.

What it really means: 4/ 5 tasks are completed on or before deadlines compared to 1/5 tasks before integrating Sparkz. Over 60,000 USD saved by identifying the least contributing devs and managers in your team and timely restructuring the team. Loss of bandwidth per dev decreased from 4 hours to 1 hour per week. Bandwidth loss means an average dev was sitting without actionable because of a blocker.

📋 Sparkz reports as the chief velocity officer at Refrens

Breakdown is the key to satisfaction Sprint Burndown Charts are a crucial tool for the Refrens. It provides visual representation of the amount of work that has been completed and the amount of work remaining in a sprint. Some charts also show the breakdown of tickets based on whether they met the Service Level Agreement (SLA) criteria or breached them.

Speed is the currency Our visual tool categorizes open tickets that require immediate attention. Teams can choose to view the information as a graph or a summary. This feature prioritizes work by type and urgency, ensuring that critical issues are addressed ASAP.

What it really means:

The team finished 4/10 major open tickets 30 hours faster than their previous average closing time. Unfinished weekly tasks came down from 37% to 12% (after 8 weeks of integration)