Case Study: Farm Credit Service of America

Turbocharged Collaboration:
FCSA Reduces Agile Planning Time by 87% and Completes Projects Faster with Visor

“Visor is a project management tool for people who don’t do project management tools. It’s a very light lift so you don’t need to know how to do certain things. You literally can just put in data, put in dates, and you’ll be able to visualize things. It is that simple. That’s what I really love about Visor.”

Gabby Colson
Business Analyst
at Farm Credit Service of America

Farm Credit Services of America (FCSA) is a leading provider of credit and insurance for farmers, ranchers, agribusinesses, and rural residents in America’s heartland. The company is part of the Farm Credit System, a nationwide network of more than 50,000 customer-owned financial institutions that provide loans and related financial services.

Gabby Colson, a business analyst at FCSA, leads and manages a team of developers to help scope the needs of the business throughout the year. Her work involves interacting with multiple teammates, heavy planning, and meeting time-sensitive deadlines. Colson identifies areas where the business can improve, gathers requirements from stakeholders, and maps out upcoming work for the developers on her team. To ensure everyone is in alignment, she must frequently update multiple colleagues, which can make collaboration and planning a challenge.

“I spend a lot of my time making sure that we’re on track, and I’m always thinking of ways to communicate how we’re on track. It’s important that I show people whether the work we’ve planned can move forward or not.”

Challenge

As a meticulous team leader, Colson understands that meeting goals depend on clear communication. Every 10 weeks, the FCSA team spends two full working days mapping out their goals for the upcoming weeks, using an agile methodology known as PI planning. During these planning sessions, the team commits to completing high-priority tasks. However, like any team, miscommunication hampers efficient project completion.

One of Colson’s biggest challenges was showing current, upcoming, or critical tasks to help the team plan ahead. She needed a way to provide a high-level overview of tasks for senior leadership who sought updates but didn’t need a granular view of the projects. For the agile team of developers she managed, she needed a graphical illustration of each task so the team can easily grasp their projected timelines.

Initially, Colson’s team relied on various project management tool, which proved time-consuming and lacked the visualizations she needed to communicate with stakeholders.

“While we have multiple tools that provide tons of details, these tools are not the easiest to create visualizations with.”

Colson sought a better solution that could streamline these processes and promote clear communication among team members.The solution would also need to integrate all of the team’s project-related data and serve as a single source of truth for urgent assignments and status updates.

Solution

After searching online, Colson discovered Visor through online research. She was able to get started quickly. Now, she can visualize projects and sync with popular workplace apps.

One of Visor’s main benefits is the ability to create Gantt charts and custom views of a project with minimal effort, offering a clear representation of project timelines, tasks, and dependencies that can help with planning. Colson praises how Visor helps with her PI planning.

“It is a lot to ask somebody to plan for 10 weeks of work, especially when I have 20 developers. And so one thing that Visor helped with tremendously is planning those high-level projects’”

With Visor, Colson gains a comprehensive understanding of how her team’s projects can align, the crucial dependencies, and any potential gaps well ahead of deadlines.

With simple drag-and-drop functionality, Colson can also update project timelines and milestones in minutes.

“Visor is a project management tool for people who don’t do project management tools,” she says. “It’s a very light lift so you don’t need to know how to do certain things. You literally can just put in data, put in dates, and you’ll be able to visualize things. It is that simple. That’s what I really love about Visor.”

Results

With Visor, FCSA has revolutionized the team’s approach to project management. Colson and her team now save hours of planning time, can easily visualize their scope of work, manage workloads and juggle assignees.

For the PI planning sessions, what once took two full days of dedicated team time now only takes approximately two hours to complete. This 87% reduction in time spent on planning sessions means the team can now dedicate more time to the needs of the business instead of more time spent on planning.

The ability to save time with PI planning highlights Visor’s ability to speed up processes for teams who use Agile methodologies. The FCSA team can now focus more on productive tasks and less on time-consuming administrative work.

With a clearer overview of their projects, Colson’s team can now plan, track and collaborate better; ensuring every team member is on the same page. By leveraging Visor’s collaborative features, teams at FCSA have transformed the way they communicate with each other and senior-level stakeholders who are not always aware of the everyday intricacies of a project.

Through Visor, Colson’s team is making a profound impact by addressing the needs of the FCSA business with precision. Better project visualizations mean the team executes tasks more efficiently, resulting in faster loan processing and greater overall success for the surrounding agricultural community.