The Information Centre at National Health services (NHS) turned to Mingle because they liked the user-friendly interface, especially the virtual card wall. In just a few months, this team not only vastly improved collaboration and project visibility, but they implemented Mingle as the foundation of their iteration and release management process.

1. CASE STUDY
mingle
R
NATIONAL HEALTH SERVICES (NHS)
Agile Project Management
Mingle Benefits
Information Centre Software Teams
Use Mingle Collaborate to Improve
Easy-to-Use Interface Development Workflow
Mingle’s user interface recreates the card
wall experience in an online environment. Utilize Tool to Introduce Engineering Best Practices
This shared space available to all team
Executive Summary--The Information Centre (IC) provides vast amounts
members, provides visibility into the
movement of work from development of healthcare information for the National Health Services (NHS),
through to deployment. England’s public healthcare system, and its development group has
numerous teams working on various projects. One development team
Improved Collaboration was looking for a way to improve collaboration. They turned to Mingle
With Mingle, development teams can work because they liked the user-friendly interface, especially the virtual card
directly with business stakeholders wall. In just a few months, this team not only vastly improved collaboration
throughout a project, from recording and project visibility, but they implemented Mingle as the foundation of
feature requirements in a story card to
their iteration and release management process.
showing overall development progress.
Managing their projects in Mingle allows
team to show consistent and predictable By relying on Mingle, the team was able to show business stakeholders
product progress to business ongoing product development, making them a more integral part of the
stakeholders. overall development process. Soon other IC development teams and
business managers wanted to use Mingle for project management. Within
Engineering Best Practices eight months of their initial trial, more than 60 people on 11 teams were
Mingle reduces tedious tasks such as using Mingle for some part of their project management process. This
manually determining project status,
rapid, organic growth of Mingle has allowed the IC development group to
which provides more time for each team to
focus on software delivery rather than the successfully establish engineering best practices that help their teams
software tool. With this emphasis on produce high-quality, consistent software delivery.
production, teams more easily adopt
engineering best practices.
For more information about Mingle
The Customer
The Information Centre for Health and Social Care (IC) is a health
information organization created by the Department of Health and is
CALL: under the authority of the National Health Service (NHS), the public
+1-312-543-2599 healthcare system in England. The IC is the country’s leading authority for
U.S. and Canadian customers health and social care information. It provides statistical information to the
+91-80-4064-9703 NHS by collecting, analyzing and converting healthcare data into useful
International customers information, and then making that information available to different
EMAIL: audiences including healthcare providers, patients and members of
studios@thoughtworks.com Parliament. The IC also produces reports that are critical to the formation
of national healthcare policy. Located in Leeds, England, the IC employs
www.thoughtworks-studios.com more than 600 people, including information analysts, developers and
project managers.
Copyright c 2009 ThoughtWorks, Inc. All rights reserved. | www.thoughtworks-studios.com

2. CASE STUDY
The Challenge collaborate with others on the project. Also, the card wall
was not a dependable planning tool. Cards would fall off and
The IC generates important statistical information from it was difficult to keep the wall up as a permanent planning
thousands of data sources including the NHS patient structure. The team wanted an online project management
administration system and healthcare providers throughout tool to help improve collaboration between their business
England who are employed by the NHS and work in NHS- stakeholders and product development. With this tool, they
run hospitals. The information generated by the IC is critical hoped to increase communication, collaboration and
to day-to-day activities, such as helping a patient find an software delivery productivity.
available doctor, as well as tracking larger societal issues,
such as healthcare problems related to an aging population.
The Solution
The development group at the IC works on up to 60 software
This first team at the IC to use Mingle was seeking to
projects at one time for both internal and external
improve collaboration. With Mingle they were able to
audiences. They write all the analytical tools and software
recreate the visual appeal of their card wall by using
that the IC information analysts use to analyze and report
Mingle’s virtual card wall, which includes automated settings
healthcare information. They also build web-based products
to move cards through the development process. While the
to deliver this information to external audiences such as
team greatly improved their collaborative efforts, they
hospitals, doctors and the general public.
quickly realized Mingle’s greater value as the foundation of
their iteration and release management process. Working
with Mingle, the team now has one shared repository where
everything from product ideas to completed work is stored
Mingle provides us increased visibility to see our
and is accessible to all team members.
workflow through the entire lifecycle. Now we can focus
on product development, rather than focusing on
Soon after downloading the trial version, Mingle become an
our project management tool. Plus, we spend less
essential part of this team’s daily development process.
time on reporting. Instead we can easily reuse Mingle’s
Since they were experienced with Agile practices, the team
development artifacts to create documentation
relied upon Mingle for their iteration planning meetings
compliant with PRINCE2 methodology.
where they reviewed story cards and played story poker to
create estimates. By tracking their work in Mingle, they
--Nick Porthouse
knew they could only accomplish 70 story points per
IT Development Manager
iteration, so they planned their bi-weekly workloads
Information Centre for Health & Social Care
accordingly. Next, the team met with their business
stakeholders to review their planned iteration. Two weeks
later, they delivered software that had been fully tested and
met all quality criteria.
Each IC project is managed by a four-person team, with
many people working on various projects. Each project is
different, and each team works in its own way. Most are
Improved collaboration and communication -
using continuous integration and a test-driven environment. Planning their web portal project in Mingle allowed the team
Some teams are closely following Agile principles, while to vastly improve their interaction with their business
others remain on the waterfall method. stakeholders, bringing them into the project early and often
to discuss its progression. The team’s business analyst
One team that was building a specialized web portal for worked with the stakeholders to create story cards, which
service commissioners at hospitals was seeking a better served as their build documentation and release workload.
way to collaborate with its members. This Agile-mature team On a weekly basis, they used Mingle to show the
was conducting two-week iterations and executing product stakeholders ongoing product development, greatly
releases for their web portal every six to eight weeks. increasing project collaboration and team communication.
The team was located on different floors in the IC offices and Time-saving project management tool -
relied upon a physical card wall for project management. For the web portal project manager, Mingle reduced the
This required that the team traverse the building to level of tedious work, such as manually asking developers
Copyright c 2009 ThoughtWorks, Inc. All rights reserved. | www.thoughtworks-studios.com

3. CASE STUDY
to provide a status update. Because all the work in stored in Because Mingle can show consistent product development
a central repository in Mingle, everyone can see the process, business stakeholders have begun to expect this
movement of work from development through deployment. level of visibility and communication from all their product
Mingle is a completely transparent system, so management teams. This push-pull combination has created a viral
can quickly look at Velocity reports to see if the team is adoption of Mingle at the IC development group. Within
going to meet their deadlines. For the developer, Mingle eight months, 60 people on 11 development teams at the IC
provides a clear view of the work in the pipeline and can were using Mingle for various parts of their development
create a sense of accomplishment when moving cards process. More importantly, by using Mingle each of these
from one column to the next. As the cornerstone of their teams began to implement engineering best practices,
development process, Mingle allowed the team to focus on allowing them to focus on improved software delivery.
product development rather than focusing on the project
management tool.
The Results
Better reporting and documentation -
With the ever-increasing number of development teams at
Because the IC is a government organization, the the IC using Mingle, what started as a solution to improve
development group has to follow government-mandated team collaboration has grown into a rapid adoption of a
methodologies of Managing Successful Programmes (MSP) highly flexible project management tool. By using Mingle,
or PRojects IN Controlled Environments (PRINCE2). teams now have better documentation, improved team
Following Agile practices and working with Mingle can be relations, greater overall project visibility, less tedious work,
accomplished within the PRINCE2 methodology. Since and the ability to show business members ongoing status of
Mingle automatically collects information about the build product development.
process, the team can easily extract information from the
story cards to create all required documentation. With Moreover, because Mingle provides a common place for all
Mingle, the team spends less time on documentation, to work, teams have become a more close-knit and
allowing them to spend more time to provide appropriate, cohesive group, working to provide quality software. From
high-quality software in production. the business side, managers are more engaged throughout
the development process. Because they can see product
Organic adoption of best practices - progress in Mingle, they are starting to expect other teams
Since Mingle is such an integral part of the development to provide this level of visibility and interaction. And finally,
process, users often keep the tool on their computer by using Mingle as the focal point of their development
screens throughout the day. Other developers see process, teams are naturally adopting engineering best
Mingle, are intrigued by the card wall metaphor, and practices that in turn help them deliver high-quality software
want to learn how to use it for their projects. Although the products that meet market demands.
visually appealing user interface was their first attraction,
other teams quickly realized that Mingle could be easily
installed and tailored to match their specific development Adaptive ALM
needs. Teams are now using Mingle for everything from
Mingle is part of the Adaptive Application Lifecycle
defect tracking, to introducing new features into existing
Management (ALM) solution from ThoughtWorks Studios.
software, to product release management.
Adaptive ALM enables each stage of the software
development process by providing Agile tools that help an
At the same time, people outside of development also
organization quickly develop and release high-quality
started to notice Mingle. For example, the manager for the
software. Adaptive ALM includes Cruise for release
web portal project shows his team’s progress in Mingle,
management, Mingle for project management and
rather than extracting the information and putting it into a
collaboration, and Twist for automated testing.
PowerPoint presentation. Instead, the manager goes into
his project board meeting with Mingle on his laptop and
reviews product progress in real-time.
Copyright c 2009 ThoughtWorks, Inc. All rights reserved. | www.thoughtworks-studios.com

4. CASE STUDY
About ThoughtWorks Studios
ThoughtWorks Studios is a global leader in Agile software development tools, and its products can be found in development
organizations seeking sustainable Agile adoption. The company’s Adaptive Application Lifecycle Management (ALM)
solution provides a platform for managing all aspects of software development, from requirements definition and project
management to test automation, quality assurance, and release management. Adaptive ALM consists of the integration of
three products: Mingle (project management), Twist (test automation) and Cruise (release management). Each tool is
available as part of a complete lifecycle solution or as a stand-alone product. Backed by more than 16 years of experience
in Agile delivery, ThoughtWorks Studios is the product division of the ThoughtWorks, Inc., the pioneering leader in Agile
development. ThoughtWorks Studios has 200 customers in more than 20 countries, including 3M, Honeywell, BBC, eBay,
Barclays, Vodafone, McGraw-Hill and Rackspace. The company headquarters is co-located in San Francisco and Bangalore,
with offices in London and select cities in Europe, Asia and Australia.
For more information, visit www.thoughtworks-studios.com
Mingle, an Agile management and collaboration tool,
provides a common workspace for all team members and an
automated system of record for all projects. Mingle can adapt
any existing workflow process and easily manages daily
development activities. Offering true-to-life visibility into the
entire development process for all stakeholders, Mingle helps
development teams become more open and collaborative.
Twist, an automated testing solution, provides English-like
constructs, making the testing process more productive for all
team members. As applications grow in complexity, Twist
helps to more easily maintain complex test suites. These
suites keep pace with application development and are held
as long-living assets.
Cruise provides both continuous integration and release
management and can drive development and IT operations to
collectively plan continuous product releases. Cruise offers
deployment pipelines and a zero-configuration build grid,
which simplify the release management process. Unlike
open-source tools, Cruise scales to meet the needs of a complex
development project with numerous dependencies.
ThoughtWorks Studios
CALL: +1-312-543-2599 | U.S. and Canadian customers EMAIL: studios@thoughtworks.com
+91-80-4064-9703 | International customers WEB: www.thoughtworks-studios.com
(ask for a Studios sales representative)
SAN FRANCISCO | CHICAGO | LONDON | BANGALORE | BEIJING | MELBOURNE
Copyright c 2009 ThoughtWorks, Inc. All rights reserved. | www.thoughtworks-studios.com