Coveo is an AI-powered search and relevance company with more than 800 employees. They use machine learning, unified search, and analytics to bring relevance to every interaction a business has with customers, partners, and employees. Read on to learn how they saved thousands of hours each year by syncing Jira and Asana with Unito.
Some of Coveo’s biggest initiatives rely on cross-team collaboration between the marketing and development teams. But each team had their own workflow — and their own tool — which created collaboration issues.
The challenge
Different teams, different tools
Coveo’s marketing team uses Asana. Their development team uses Jira. If you want these teams to work together, you need to find a way to reconcile that difference. What about having both teams use the same tool?
“Asana is a much simpler tool than Jira,” Samantha, Senior Content Manager at Coveo, explains. “It has a nicer UX and it is easier to get started using. Most of the marketing team is familiar with Asana and likes it as a planning tool. The team took a look at Jira and was just not excited by it. It’s too complex.”
So what about the reverse?
As Scrum Master Vincent explains, that wasn’t an option either. “I’ve used Jira for years at my last job, and when it came time to start measuring and forecasting work more accurately for the web team at Coveo, I wanted those estimation tools, the reporting, and the velocity measurement and customization options. The whole dev team loved Jira’s features, but then we weren’t on the same tool stack as everyone else.”
Too many emails and meetings
What do you do when you have two teams using different tools who need to collaborate on a regular basis? You have a few options. Either you send out constant update emails, set up regular update meetings, or have someone running between the two tools, keeping everything updated manually.
It’s labor-intensive, taxing on everyone’s schedules, and it doesn’t really work.
“It was a mess,” said Gautier Lemesle, Interactive Director at Coveo. “I got three emails the same day from different team members who had experienced scheduling and delivery problems due to lack of coordination. Then I got a call from the Head of Marketing: ‘I don’t care how, but you need to fix this.'”
Since no one was giving up their tool and carrying information over wasn’t working, Coveo needed to think of something else.
The solution
Deep integrations
The Coveo team knew they needed a way to integrate Asana with Jira. They started by turning to Zapier. Zapier is a well-known integration tool that enables simple, trigger-based automations based on cause and effect logic. If thing A happens, then so does thing B. For example, you could set up a Zap that sends you an email whenever a card is created on a Trello board. Zaps are available for just about any application you can think of, including the most popular work management tools.
But for the scale at which Coveo operates, Zapier just didn’t cut it. The team spent over 20 hours trying to configure their Zaps so they could keep comments, assignees, due dates, and statuses updated across both tools.
“In the end, we just weren’t able to make it work. Zapier is a great tool and I use it a lot, but it’s not the right tool for this job. The only way to fix things was to connect the tools together,” Gautier explained.
Two-way relationships between tools
That’s when Coveo turned to Unito.
Unito’s 2-way sync functionality connects work management tools and IT management tools (such as ServiceNow and Jira Service Management). This two-way relationship means that, with a quick setup, Jira and Asana projects essentially become one. No matter what tool someone is using, they can interact with a project and know that nothing gets lost in translation.
And setting up a sync didn’t take 20 hours. “We watched the video and said ‘Yeah, that’s exactly the same problem we have,'” Vincent says. “About 15 minutes later we had created our sync.”
The results
Better visibility
After just a few minutes, Coveo’s projects were synced across tools, meaning everyone knew what was going on. Because everything got carried over with the sync, no one had to copy everything over.
Project managers each saved about four hours a week on scheduling and coordination busy work. Teams didn’t need as many status meetings to stay in the loop. Even better, double-entry work was completely eliminated.
Beyond just saving everyone time, Unito brought Coveo’s teams increased visibility. Upper management became more engaged with individual tasks and were more aware of ongoing projects. That’s because they could stay updated on everything happening in both Jira and Asana without having to jump back and forth between tools.
More productive time
““We saved more than 40 hours a week after syncing Asana and Jira through Unito,” Gautier highlights. “Our engagement with the C-suite was far, far better than expected.”
People want to work with people, not their tools. With Unito’s 2-way sync, a marketer didn’t have to worry about working around Jira to collaborate with a developer, and that developer didn’t have to worry about Asana. Everyone could focus on what needed to get done instead of how they were going to do it.
Gautier Lemesle, Interactive Director
Keep everyone aligned
With Unito’s sync, Coveo was able to truly align their development and marketing teams. That meant fewer meetings, no double entry, and increased visibility for everyone across the organization. With this sync, Coveo built the workflow they needed without having to add a new tool.
Unito’s internal estimates of Coveo’s usage (a combination of items in sync and users working with Unito workflows) calculates approximately 43+ hours and $4,200 USD saved per week in time that would otherwise be spent on manual upkeep between tools.
Watch how quickly you can sync Jira and Asana:
Follow our guide to integrate Jira and Asana with Unito.
Or check out Unito’s pricing plans to see which might be the best for you (there’s also a two-week free trial!)
About Coveo
Coveo is an AI-powered search and relevance company that uses machine learning, unified search, and analytics to bring more relevance to business interactions.
