Quorum's Journey: Scaling Software Delivery with Haystack

Learn how Quorum, a leading public affairs software company, enhanced its development process with the support of Haystack’s analytics tools. This case study highlights how actionable insights, real-time alerts, and a focus on key metrics helped improve Quorum’s software delivery pipeline, resulting in faster, higher-quality, and more efficient releases.

Challenge

Quorum, a rapidly growing leader in public affairs software, needed to continue to scale its development operations while maintaining agility and quality. For Chris McFadden, CTO of Quorum, the challenge was clear: drive innovation at scale while ensuring engineering teams remained empowered, efficient, and aligned.

The company prioritized three critical objectives:

• Strategic Reporting: Simplify complex metrics into actionable insights for leadership.
• Team Empowerment: Provide real-time visibility and alerting for better decision-making.
• Efficient Focus: Identify and address critical issues without getting bogged down in noise.

Solution

To achieve these goals, Quorum implemented comprehensive process improvements across their development lifecycle. As part of this transformation, they leveraged Haystack to provide the analytics and insights that supported their optimization efforts.Key features that drove success included:

1. Comprehensive Metrics Tracking: Real-time dashboards for critical DORA metrics like lead time, cycle time, and deployment frequency allowed team to spot bottlenecks and improve workflows quickly.
2. Proactive Alerts: Configurable Slack notifications ensured teams were immediately aware of potential issues, such as long-running tasks or exceeded WIP limits, enabling timely interventions.
3. Customized Reporting: Leadership-level insights offered clear, actionable overviews of team performance and project health, supporting data-driven decision-making.

Outcomes

Through their process improvements and the use of Haystack, Quorum achieved significant improvements across key areas of their software delivery process over the past 24 months:

As Quorum has grown, these outcomes enhanced operational efficiency and helped Quorum to continue to deliver and exceed customer expectations.

Why Haystack?

Haystack stood out for its ability to turn engineering data into actionable insights, offering:

• A user-friendly interface that required minimal training.
• Seamless integration with existing tools, ensuring rapid deployment.
• Real-time metrics and alerts that aligned perfectly with Quorum’s agile principles.

“Haystack has been instrumental in our efforts to optimize our software delivery pipeline. The real-time visibility into our development metrics, particularly change lead time tracking & alerting and health reporting, has allowed us to improve our data-driven decisions and more efficient workflow.”

— Chris McFadden, CTO, Quorum