Mitel Is Leading the Future of Communications and Collaboration With ZenHub

Changing the way businesses communicate and collaborate

Since 1973, Mitel has helped organizations and their customers communicate and collaborate seamlessly. Powering connections for nearly 50 years, Mitel is trusted by 70 million business users in more than 100 countries.

Innovation is central to Mitel’s DNA and Mitel’s Research and Development teams work to transform communications in order to meet the evolving needs of businesses around the world. As emerging technologies become mainstream, the ideas from this team help deliver greater productivity and tighter collaboration among employees.

Striving for constant innovation

When Mitel assigned a new project to Chris Koch, Project Manager, and Tom Quan, Research and Development Director, they were asked to explore software development techniques that reduced friction, improved speed, and increased responsiveness across their teams.

Many of the tools that were already in use within the company are Enterprise-level tools deployed for use with a wide range of Mitel products. Supporting a diverse product portfolio drives in house tool complexity and adds significant overhead to ticket management. Having so many tools requires consistent change management coupled with automated metrics to ensure Mitel products are in working order.

For Chris and Tom, working in an agile development environment with frequent weekly releases, it was very important to remove these roadblocks and empower the engineering team to move as quickly as possible. At first, GitHub seemed like a no brainer. It added speed and agility, but what they later found out is that it was lacking the most basic project management capabilities.

Mitel chooses ZenHub

Tom and Chris were looking for a project management solution that would fill in the gaps they found within GitHub which would allow them to move fast, onboard very quickly, and return value in a very short period of time. ZenHub made the most sense compared to other project management tools in the market because of its close integration with GitHub.

“We were looking for a lightweight solution, integrated with GitHub, that needed to be easy to deploy and manage,” said Chris.

Tom added, “Our projects are very complex and we have them distributed across many GitHub repositories. ZenHub gives the ability to look across multiple repos and allows us to organize and create the dependencies across all these repositories. This is a very essential thing for us.”

Getting more out of ZenHub

Another teammate, Thane Eisene, Director of Research and Development at Mitel, enjoys using ZenHub’s burndown charts and the milestones feature because it enables him to align everyone and to quickly establish velocity for his team. Thane and his team were dealing with some tight deadlines for a project, and ZenHub helped them to determine what it was going to take to deliver work on time based on a couple of milestones. “We were a new team, we made some assumptions on velocity increasing time over time, month by month, and with ZenHub it was easy to check if these assumptions were becoming accurate or not, also to adjust accordingly,” says Thane.

As organizations across the world look to quickly implement collaboration solutions to meet their ever-changing needs, Mitel can continue to transform the future of business communications and collaboration with ZenHub’s flexible suite of tools.

To read more about how a software team can benefit from adopting ZenHub, check out this other blog post here.