Team ’24 Europe – Lavazza adds Jira and Confluence to streamline its digital marketing operation

Founded in Turin, Italy, in 1895, Lavazza is well known as a leading coffee brand, operating in 140 markets worldwide with revenues of over €3.1 billion ($3.4bn) and with over 5000 employees. The brand’s global online presence is maintained through the Lavazza Group’s 40 websites and seven e-commerce sites, managed by a central digital marketing IT team. But maintaining this online presence was becoming a challenge.

There were three different processes in place for managing and rolling out campaigns and updates to the various online properties, and each of them operated autonomously, leading to difficulties due to poor communication and mismatched delivery. Much of the communication was done via email and Excel spreadsheets, and there was little standardization in how requests were expressed or requirements defined.

In an attempt to forecast demand, at the end of each year the digital marketing team would do a worldwide survey of all of the development needs for its digital platform in the coming year. This demand planning step was crucial to plan capacity across the internal team and its partner agencies and system integrators. But it was rushed and lacked detail.

When it came to individual requirements, teams made a business request for specific activities as outlined in the annual plan. Speaking in a session at this week’s Team ’24 Europe conference, Matteo Lanfranco, IT Marketing Manager, Lavazza Group, gave an example of a business request for a campaign to coincide with Valentine’s Day:

In the demand plan we are collecting which are the activities that we have to do, but then from an operational point of view, we have to deliver these activities. And so the business request is something that the businesses open during the year, asking agencies to perform that activity.

You can imagine the plan is that next year I want to launch a campaign for St Valentine with a discount of 10%. But then, before St Valentine, you have to open a business request, and then you have to [commission] the agency to configure how much the cost is of the promo, and configure everything that is required for St Valentine’s.

This campaign might require new capabilities to be added to the digital platform, in which case the IT team would also need to kick off a technology enhancement process to put them in place. He goes on:

We need to be able to collect all the requirements that will end on the IT side with the new development. Because maybe with St Valentine, the marketing team invent a fantastic promo with a fantastic [feature] that we didn’t have on our platform, so we have to know at the beginning of the year that something will happen, and we have to manage the development, the right capacity, with our system integrators.

Making a better connection

But with little detail recorded in the demand planning process and a lack of structure or common language in how business requests were submitted, there were often misunderstandings about what was needed. He explains:

The uncommon language was an issue because most of the time there was already, as I said, an issue between demand planning and business reviews, but also on their design. The requirement was not so clear. So most of the time we were trying to deliver something, but then at the end, during the [hand-off] phase it was not really what they were expecting.

Often, the IT team would be taken by surprise when a marketing team chased up a business request and discovered that some vital element had not been progressed because it was not clear there was some IT work needed to make it happen. It was clear that Lavazza needed a better system. Lanfranco concludes:

The idea was, let’s try to make a better connection, in order to intercept in advance which are the needs that are coming on their designers, in order to have a better alignment between the [IT delivery] and the expectation of the marketing team.

A project began in 2019 to merge the three silos into a single integrated system that would allow for an end-to-end process where the necessary information was collected at the right time and fed through to where it was needed. This would be a major improvement, as he explains:

We are managing a digital platform that is used everywhere in our subsidiaries. [We needed a system where] everyone in the Lavazza ecosystem, all the departments, they can raise issues on our platform. There are a lot of internal users to manage and a lot of information that needs to be analyzed and shared with the business partners in the different subsidiaries…

[We were aiming for an] environment where demand planning is really structured. All the information is stored somewhere and they are clear. It’s something that the team can easily understand and easily view on the backend in order to plan a business request. Speaking with the common language, you can easily translate them online inside the business request, and then with some automated process.

On the IT side, the goal was, let’s try to be aligned at the beginning so we know when we have to act. We can intercept the needs. We can reduce the time to market. And another goal was really trying to improve the quality of our product.

Tracking performance

Being able to monitor performance and track SLAs and KPIs was another key goal of having everything in one system. He goes on:

We don’t want a process that is live, and then we leave it there. But we want day by day to spend time to understand what is working well, what is working worse, what we can improve. And so we really needed to have some KPIs. We needed to collect information that we use internally, as I say, to improve, but then that we use also with the different actors to align them on how is going the request, how is going the process.

When the system went live in 2021, designed with the help of Atlassian specialist Hinto Group, it brought together Java Service Management (JSM), which had already been in use at Lavazza, along with Jira to track IT projects and Confluence to share project information and reference documents.

The core tool is JSM, which has an online, self-service facility for business users to submit business requests with all the necessary information. They can also submit requests direct to Lavazza’s digital agencies. These contractors, along with systems integrators, can use the self-service portal to report on progress and check project status of work they’re involved in, while the central digital marketing team can track that contractors are meeting their SLAs and also schedule work across the year. Lanfranco comments:

You can imagine, as I said before, requests for the next year that are coming online and from all departments. So we are speaking about 1000s of requests. They need to filter, they need to plan, they need to check, they need to ask for more information. So there is a specific workflow…

There is also a big job that is on the backend side, because [we] need to be able to understand how is going the planning. Is there is a specific period of the year where we are overloaded, or a specific time of the year where we can maybe push or move something because we have more capacity? …

All the data that we collected, we started to set up specific SLAs for our activities, but also for our external partners. So we were able to monitor agencies or system integrators that were delivering on time and with the right expectation. And then we’re monitoring our KPI in order to, every month, together with the stakeholders of the marketing team, try to understand that if we had to work in process in order to improve or enhance something.

Becoming more organized

One big change is that there’s a lot more time invested in getting the initial specification right. He explains:

Compared to the past, we are investing a lot of time in the requirements phases — and we know [this metric] thanks to all the KPIs, to the reporting that we have. So now we know that one third of the time, even more, sometimes half of the time to market, we spend it in the requirement phase. So we are checking a user story, we are writing, we are analyzing, we have time. Thanks to that, in a natural way, we are able to then deliver really what we need.

The result is far fewer issues have arisen when delivering a project. He says:

We had a drastic reduction of escalation of the business because we were out of time…

 

We were able to share all the information to the final user to be always aligned. Thanks also this kind of alignment, they were really proactive when we were asking something else. So if we have to ask more details, if we need to collect a specific feedback, and they were really working and checking day by day on the activities.

There were some hitches in the beginning getting users to adjust to the new system. There were no problems onboarding the digital marketing team at headquarters, because they had the skills to understand the system and why it was needed. But when going out to local marketing teams, they didn’t always understand why they couldn’t just carry on sending off emails to make requests. People have now got used to the tool, says Lanfranco, but they do still complain about having to think through the request and gather together all the necessary information.

The project ended up with a higher cost for the software than initially thought, but the benefits come from much better organized information and more orderly delivery of completed projects. He concludes:

If I am able at the beginning of the year to have a full picture of the year, I can share also this plan with the agency. They can plan better the capacity. Maybe we can have a discount, or maybe during the year, we can optimize something and give you more credit to edit a website or to launch a promotion, because we are managing everything from that point…

On the IT side, my main concern was I don’t want to spend weeks on bug fixing. I don’t want to spend hours checking emails where you send me a requirement, or you correct a requirement [in an urgent phone call] at seven-thirty during the evening!

Check out diginomica’s dedicated Team ’24 Europe content hub here.