Royal Caribbean saves 840 hours/year and $550k/year by scaling agile delivery with Atlassian cloud

On a journey to scale agile

As over 5 million passengers board Royal Caribbean’s 65+ ships to cruise the world every year, they’re bound to encounter different languages and ways of life. They must find ways to communicate with each other to meet their needs and fulfill their vacation goals. 

When Wais Mojaddidi joined Royal Caribbean in fall 2022 as the Director of Agile Delivery for Global Ecommerce, he noticed teams within the company were having similar journeys. The company’s Global Ecommerce organization grew rapidly post pandemic. To meet demand, they had to create new teams fast that would support capability development. 

During that time, some teams had customized their Jira workflows and configurations, which made it difficult to compare work across teams. “It was like using different languages to speak. There were different definitions of done, epics created and connected in different ways, and more,” Wais explains. “Teams were still able to work at a high level to meet demand. But without one source of truth in Atlassian, we needed manual PowerPoint presentations and lengthy conversations to communicate. And in PowerPoint, you can tell a story, but it’s not connected to the data.” 

Tasked with solving these challenges and scaling Royal Caribbean’s agile delivery, Wais launched an initiative to optimize the company’s Atlassian cloud platform and create a centralized repository. Together with their Solution Partner, Globant, Global Ecommerce has aligned the teams’ ways of working, helped everyone stay focused on the right work, saved time on manual report creation, and gained new transparency into real-time data for better decision-making.

A new solution for efficient, effective portfolio management

Quickly growing from a few scrum teams to over a dozen required leveraging best practices for agile at scale. Fortunately, Wais and the Global Ecommerce leadership team had a plan: introduce a tailored Lean Portfolio Management (LPM) framework to prioritize the right work and drive the right outcomes, at scale. 

“For us to activate and operationalize LPM, we needed our ways of working and language across teams to be consistent. The standardization in language allowed us to connect epics, features, and stories across our portfolio in a meaningful way, while also using LPM to prioritize value-first capability development linked to OKRs. Using this framework, everyone from the team level to the VP level understood how we use value-first prioritization when deciding what to focus on,” he says. 

The Global Ecommerce leadership team envisioned Royal Caribbean’s existing Atlassian toolset playing a key role in achieving this vision – though it would require some changes. Wais had over ten years of experience using Atlassian tools, but he needed more resources and expertise to support this initiative. After reaching out to Globant and seeing their previous successes with similar initiatives, Royal Caribbean engaged with the team for help assessing their current Atlassian setup, designing a new solution, and implementing it. 

An agile approach builds progress and partnership

Following their standard agile process, the Atlassian Team within Global Ecommerce partnered with stakeholders to gather inputs and requirements, iteratively pilot standardized solutions, optimize based on feedback, then scale. 

As Royal Caribbean worked with Globant on pilots, the sandbox within Jira Cloud Premium made it easy to create multiple proofs of concept. Wais and his team then demoed the solutions to stakeholders from multiple disciplines, discussed feedback, and brought recommendations back to Globant. “The sandbox in Jira Cloud Premium was an essential feature for us during this collaborative journey. It was a place to experiment with proofs of concept and plugins. It added a ton of value!” Wais says.

As Globant and Royal Caribbean configured workflows and established common language definitions, Wais and his team brought users into the process to gain buy-in. “People were on board with Atlassian, so we just needed to make tradeoffs and sacrifices to convince them to standardize, consolidate reporting, and scale,” Wais says. “To iteratively gain momentum, we had to find the right folks who influence others and invest in the people who are using these tools. They needed to feel like they were part of the solution.”

Bon voyage, 80-page PowerPoints. Welcome aboard, automated real-time Confluence reports.

As Global Ecommerce and Globant rolled out Royal Caribbean’s new solution, they traded extensive, static presentations with snapshots in time, for one Confluence page with real-time data pulled from Jira. This not only saves time, but also helps keep everyone aligned, quickly see what’s happening, and understand why. 

“Rather than relying on team members and paying consultants to create and maintain 80-page PowerPoint decks every month, we could use resource capacity more effectively. Let’s spend less time with manual reporting and more time on the discovery and delivery of best-in-class capability,” Wais says. “With Globant’s help, we created one interactive Confluence page that automatically pulls accurate and real-time data, uses consistent language, and connects to the work we’re doing,” Wais says. 

The page includes multiple sections, including:

Over 800 hours and $550,000 saved in the first year alone

With real-time, integrated Confluence pages to replace bulky monthly reports, Royal Caribbean is capturing significant time and cost savings.

“By leveraging Jira and Confluence for automated reporting, we’re saving over 800 hours and $500,000 per year in management consulting costs previously spent on manual reporting," Wais says. "We decreased the time spent gathering data and building manual PowerPoint reports from eight hours per month for each of our teams, to just 15 minutes per team – a huge savings that will only grow as we continue to scale."

In addition, standardizing Jira issue types, fields, and user seats saved almost $50,000 and eliminated over 70% of roadmaps and workflows for a cleaner, more efficient system. 

Wais says this is only the beginning for Royal Caribbean’s journey toward scaling agile. His team is already working with Globant on the next steps of their roadmap, including release management standardization and tracking the impact of their improvements. 

“Now we can start connecting our work to actual customer data so we can track outcomes, in addition to outputs,” Wais says. “And once we mature and stabilize portfolio-level reporting, we’re going to help support enterprise-level initiatives. How do we impact the 1,800+ people on other instances across the organization? We can show them how to use these tools in the right way to provide transparency into the work, cross-team connectivity, and linkage to our OKRs to drive outcomes.” 

With a common language, single source of truth, and the latest information always at their fingertips, Global Ecommerce is ready to help Royal Caribbean cruise full steam ahead on their journey toward delivering agile products at scale — and vacations of a lifetime.