How the UK’s Top Payroll and HR Solutions Provider Uses Craft.io to Better Serve its Customers
Zellis leverages Craft.io’s Capacity Planning for improved dependencies management and resource allocation and the platform’s Guru Views to better prioritize what matters most for its customers
With Craft.io, we finally have a single source of truth for release planning across the entire organization.
Chris Quiney, Director of Product Management at Zellis
The Company
The largest provider of payroll and HR solutions for the UK and Ireland.
Technology company Zellis plays an indispensable role in the UK and Ireland’s economic well-being.
Each month, organizations across a wide range of industries — including 31% of FTSE 100 corporations — use Zellis’ payroll software to pay more than 3 million employees. The company’s Managed Payroll Services division also administers payments totalling more than £30 billion each year to its customers’ employees.
Today, Zellis is the largest provider of payroll and HR solutions for the UK and Ireland.
The Challenges
Lack of a central product platform made release planning difficult.
As a payroll and HR software company, Zellis faces several unique challenges in its product development. Because payroll in general is subject to ever-changing legislative updates, the company needs to release new functionality on a frequent basis to keep its business customers compliant.
Chris Quiney, Director of Product Management for Zellis, explains that given all these factors, the company needs to build and release software frequently. But with product data maintained in different places and in different formats, pulling together the big picture for release planning was always a challenge.
“The product information we needed to plan our releases was documented in different formats: Word, Excel, PowerPoint. And we couldn’t sync our strategic plans with our developers’ work in Azure DevOps. Planning releases always felt complicated and rushed, and we’d worry we were missing dependencies or other important details.”
The Solution
Craft.io offers an organization-wide hub for up-to-date product planning.
Chris and his team created a requirements list for product management software to improve Zellis’s release planning. Those requirements — which included prioritization templates, capacity planning, feedback analysis, dependency management, and app integrations, among others — reduced the list of viable solutions to just a few. And after demos with each of those platforms, Chris’s team agreed on a clear winner.
“Craft.io had everything we needed to centralize our work across product teams, help us allocate resources more efficiently, and know that we were delivering the functionality most strategically valuable for our customers.”
We’re huge fans of Craft.io’s Guru Views, especially for prioritization. In fact, we used one of these templates to customize our own prioritization framework called FRESH — to calculate an item’s Financial considerations, Reach, Effort, Strategic value, and Happiness for customers.
Chris Quiney, Director of Product Management at Zellis
The Results
Planning and releasing products more confidently than ever.
With Craft.io now serving as the company’s single source of product truth, Chris explains, Zellis’s multiteam product department is benefiting in numerous important ways.
Planning efficiently
Given how frequently Zellis needs to release new software — to stay aligned with evolving legislative requirements, customisations for specific customers, etc. — the company’s product teams truly appreciate being able to coordinate all of that work in a central, up-to-date location.
“Whether we’re pulling all our product teams together to review large-scale development initiatives or just meeting for a sprint, those planning sessions are so much more productive and efficient now that we have all the data we need — for all our teams — in Craft.io.”
Tracking dependencies
One ongoing risk of the company’s decentralized product data was the lack of visibility into dependencies across teams. This left Zellis’s product work open to two types of inefficiencies: teams not being able to complete functionality due to an untracked dependency, or teams duplicating work out of a concern for a potential missed dependency.
“Another benefit of centralizing our product data in Craft.io is that all our product teams can quickly identify dependencies in their plans and collaborate closely with whichever teams are working on the items they’ll need.”
Better alignment to customers needs
Finally, Chris notes, Zellis is also leveraging two areas of the Craft.io platform — the Feedback Portal and Guru Views — to ensure their teams are always prioritizing work that matters most to their customers.
“We started an initiative called Product Champions, where we encourage people across the company to engage with customers, learn their needs, and bring that feedback to us. Now that we have Craft.io, we’re gaining real value from that data. We add it to the Feedback Portal in Craft.io, and then we use a prioritization framework we created using custom fields in a Craft.io Guru View to evaluate and score each item. The result is that we’re building products more strategically, and we’re better serving our customers.”
One thing that made Craft.io stand out was their level of attention and responsiveness. We could tell immediately this would be a true partnership. And considering we’ve been able to influence the Craft.io roadmap — things we’ve asked for have made their way into the platform — it’s clear going with Craft.io was the right call.
Chris Quiney, Director of Product Management at Zellis
Zellis s favorite Craft.io features
| Capacity planning | Feedback portal | Azure DevOps integration |
| To plan product releases more efficiently. | To centralize and analyze stakeholder feedback | To keep product and dev teams’ work synced. |
