Life at Easy Agile
6 min read
2021: A Year in Review
Tue Nov 30 2021
As the year draws to a close and with Christmas around the corner, we wanted to take some time to reflect on the year that was.
Recapping some milestones and major achievements, another crazy year with all the lows and highs but coming away from it with new experiences and new perspectives.
We wanted to take this time to thank our customers for your ongoing support and our team for your commitment and dedication #commitasateam. Thank you all for showing up, lending a hand and helping us to make Easy Agile the company it is today. Without you, these milestones wouldn’t be possible.
A look back at 2021.
Our First Sustainability, Community & Inclusion Report
We are extremely excited and proud to introduce our first Sustainability, Community, and Inclusion Report.
We believe business should be good for both the people and the planet. We are learning to play our part as we implement regenerative actions towards creating a more inclusive, just, and equitable future.
Recognising our impact as a business is key to understanding how we can contribute to the conversation, identifying the risks and opportunities to grow and improve. We look forward to continuing to interpret our findings in a way that will better our team, customers, community and the planet.
We’re Cloud Fortified
All Easy Agile products are now Cloud Fortified!
The Cloud Fortified program and badge makes it super simple for customers to identify enterprise-ready cloud apps with additional security, reliability, and support.
In November 2021, the Easy Agile team proudly said “Wooohooo!” as we became Cloud Fortified across our full product range 🙌 🙌
11 Koalas Adopted
We ran a SAFe Koalafication Competition! Here at Easy Agile, one of our core values is Give Back. We love to actively participate in our communties and continue to educate ourselves on areas that need our attention. Whether it's showing up, lending a hand, teaching a skill or donating dollars.
The competition was a chance to join us and support giving back. In May 2021, we ran a give back themed competiton! Who doesn't love koalas and a qualification, that's why we combined the two. Giving you the chance to get SAFe koalafied and adopt a koala.
Congratulations to the winner - Laurie Calverley from Cancer Research UK and the runners up.
$75,000 donated through Pledge 1%
Easy Agile commits to pledging 2% profit: 1% going directly to Room to Read plus another 1% reserved for team member giving through Good Thnx and Open Collective.
For calendar year 2021, we donated $75,000 AUD.
Product Highlights
This year saw many improvements and new features across the Easy Agile Products.
The features you value most in Easy Agile Programs have been brought together in the one view and enhanced to deliver the full SAFe Program Board experience.
A more focused view of the Program Board means that Release Train Engineers, Scrum Masters, Product Managers and Product Owners can easily identify features the teams are working on, and associated dependencies, for more productive and collaborative Scrum of Scrums or ART syncs.
- Feature level dependencies
- Milestones
- Filter by Portfolio Epic
As the most voted issue on our backlog, we were beyond excited to announce that the Program and Program Increment custom fields are now visible on all Jira issues in your Program for greater visibility and transparency 👏
A new level of story map hierarchy:
We introduced a powerful new way to visualise your scope of work. Configure a third level hierarchy in your story map to group your epics and issues by the initiative you choose.
This third level of hierarchy will help teams, product owners, and business owners alike gain a better understanding of the scope and progress of work. Using the story map to visualise how initiatives are broken down into epics and issues will give all stakeholders a clearer picture of work required, completed, and yet to come.
We made sprint planning quicker and more seamless for our customers who use the Story Map during their sprint planning sessions.
No more tedious scrolling & dragging issues across the story map, using our new quick actions menu you can now send issues:
- to the top and bottom of the backlog, or
- to another sprint
8 new episodes of the Easy Agile Podcast
We kept the momentum going with the Easy Agile Podcast.
This last year we were joined by some amazing guests talking about everything from the agile mindset, women in tech, agile transformations, diversity, equity & inclusion in agile, and observability.
Big thanks to all our guests & listeners! Stay tuned for next year.
Winners of Excellence in Import & Export
More recently Easy Agile took home the award for Excellence in import & export at the Illawarra Business Awards. This award highlights our positive reputation for Australian products and services in international markets.
A big thank you to our team for their amazing efforts and to the Illawarra community for being such a supportive and innovative hub to call home. We are thrilled we can service a global customer base from here in the Illawarra. #commitasateam
3rd Place in Codegeist 2021!
Congratulations to the Easy Agile Jira Hero team! The team worked to build the Forge app "Easy Agile's Jira Hero" for Codegeist 2021. The app makes getting started in Jira a seamless and fun experience.
The team worked on the app during 2 internal hackathon weeks we call inception week. It was their first experience using Forge and the rest of the Easy Agile team are super proud of their efforts! #commitasateam
Congrats to John, Adrian, Sam, Sean, Angad, Jared, Jamie and Chris M. Go team!
Easy Agile in Top 100 Fastest Growing Companies in Australia!
The cherry on top 🍰 We ranked #74 on the 2021 Australian Financial Review Fast 100 list!
“It is incredible to be included on the AFR Fast 100 list and to be a part of the Illawarra’s growing tech scene. We’re actively recruiting software developers from within NSW with an eye to expanding the depth and adoption of our products even further.” - Dave Elkan, Co-CEO of Easy Agile.
We are incredibly proud of this achievement, big thanks to our team and customers for their continued support.
Once again a giant THANK YOU! 2021 you’ve been great but we’re ready to kick even more goals and take Easy Agile to the next level in 2022.
Merry Christmas & Happy New Year to you and your families ❤️
