Accident Compensation Corporation (ACC)

The ACC manages New Zealand’s universal no-fault accidental injury medical insurance scheme, which provides compensation and support to injured citizens, residents, and temporary visitors.

The ACC’s Chief Information Officer has 120 staff members performing environment and release management for the system used to register and manage claims.

“On a daily basis we have application changes, application releases, infrastructure changes, and infrastructure groupings,” says Dan Jacobs, Manager of Planning and Change. “Our main measurement of success is the delivery of change into production without incident, on schedule and to the right level of quality.”

Excel Wasn’t Working

Before implementing Plutora, the ACC used Excel to manage their releases and environments. Report creation was a time-consuming manual process and data was often incomplete or out-of-date.

“Our key challenges were the lack of a single source of truth, incomplete and inconsistent sharing of the data, and too many individual reference data sets about the release schedule, content and data,” says Jacobs.

Implementing Plutora helped the ACC overcome these issues.

“Our team used to be only visible if we got things wrong. Now we’re visible in terms of demonstrating that we’ve got things under control,” says Jacobs.

Reports that took days to create manually with Excel only take a single click with Plutora.”Dan Jacobs, Manager of Planning and Change, ACC

Business Benefits

The ACC makes full use of Plutora’s many features.

“We use Plutora for release templates, creating releases, populating releases with dates, putting content in and getting reports out,” says Jacobs. “We use Plutora for environment management as well.”

The main users of Plutora at the ACC are release managers and environment managers. “We have a lot of environments. We have a lot of components, and the test guys are using it to track their progress during the test phase,” says Jacobs. “On a day-to-day basis they’re maintaining the data and rolling it all up in reports.”

Plutora is used to create the IT department’s all-important monthly report. “We include metrics we’ve taken out of Plutora, such as the number of releases of different types that we’ve done in a period of time, and the business benefits they deliver,” says Jacobs.

Obviously Better

Plutora makes every aspect of the ACC’s releases and environments visible.

“We use Plutora to manage release contents, timelines, milestones and for tracking progress for meeting reports,” says Jacobs.

Plutora’s Release Calendar makes it easy to plan releases. “We design our release calendar with gaps to allow for down periods for stability and testing. We put a lot of focus into deployment planning,” says Jacobs.

The ACC uses Plutora to visualize multiple releases at once. “The main thing we use is the day-by-day release calendar report. We also have a report for release milestones. It shows all the milestones and their dates in the releases that are currently in progress or coming up,” says Jacobs.

He adds, “I use Plutora as a reporting application, so I know what’s happening.”

"The data from Plutora that people look at in meetings is now always the same format, complete and obtained from the same source. It’s obviously better.”Dan Jacobs, Manager of Planning and Change, ACC