As a global Shopify agency grew into larger, more complex enterprise engagements, the project management approach that had carried them through their early years started to show its limits. Delivery ran across a patchwork of tools, handoffs between sales and delivery teams were inconsistent, and leadership had no reliable way to see how projects, or the business as a whole, were actually performing. We partnered with their PMO to design and roll out a standardized delivery framework in Jira that could scale with them.

The Challenge

The agency’s project management processes had grown organically alongside the business. Statements of work were written at too high a level to drive real delivery planning, and the detailed workstream trackers PMs relied on internally were never shared with clients, so misalignment was already baked in by kickoff. The discovery phase had no standardized deliverables and no clearly defined roles. Every project reinvented the wheel, and new team members had no consistent onboarding to lean on.

Work itself was scattered across Google Drive, Asana, and a partial Jira rollout. Change orders were tracked by hand in spreadsheets, which led to errors and delays as the number of active engagements grew. Status reporting was manual and inconsistent from project to project, so stakeholders often worked from outdated information. As the agency moved further into the enterprise segment, leadership had no rollup view of project health, team capacity, or delivery costs across the portfolio.

The Solution

The engagement started where the pain was sharpest: templates. The agency needed PMs to spin up a new project with minimal manual setup, but Jira’s native cloning only goes one level deep, and the agency’s project structure of epics, workstreams, and underlying tasks ran three levels. We built a locked template project maintained by a small group, along with an automation layer that could reliably clone the full structure into new projects. That automation carried through to onboarding: a PM enters a project name, type, and key dates, and the system creates a matching Jira project and Confluence space, pre-populated with the charter, RACI, roadmap, and other standard documentation.

With templates in place, we turned to workflows and permissions. Issue types, statuses, and fields were simplified and standardized across the agency’s project-based delivery teams and their ongoing retainer teams, and custom fields were added only where they served a real reporting or audit need. Permissions were set up so PMs could see the budget signals that mattered, hours against plan and margin health, without exposing individual billing rates. A small leadership group kept visibility into the more sensitive financial detail.

Reporting was the next gap. We built a standard dashboard for every active project so development and QA leads had a consistent view of sprint velocity, cycle time, and team workload. We also built an all-up dashboard across projects so leadership could see resource allocation across delivery and retainer work in one place, something they hadn’t had before. To make those reports trustworthy, we moved the agency onto Timely as the system of record for time tracking, linked directly to Jira worklogs, and worked with engineering leadership to standardize Jira-to-GitHub linking so cycle-time and pull-request data would actually populate instead of quietly going missing.

The agency’s portfolio tracker, previously a manually maintained spreadsheet, was rebuilt as a structured database in Confluence. Fields like RAG status and priority now live natively in Jira and flow through automatically, while signed SOWs, budget trackers, and change orders are linked directly from each project’s row. The PMO team can work from one place instead of hunting across Drive folders. We wrapped up the engagement with recorded walkthroughs and documentation so the internal team could take ownership of the new system with confidence.

Quantifiable Results

The agency moved its full portfolio, both project-based delivery work and ongoing retainer engagements, off Asana and disconnected spreadsheets and into a single Jira and Confluence environment. A project setup process that used to take hours of manual work now runs off a locked template through a repeatable clone-and-launch flow. Every active project has a standardized reporting dashboard, and leadership finally has a cross-project view of workload that didn’t exist before. Budget and change-order tracking, previously running at an estimated 80% accuracy through manually updated spreadsheets, now runs through a structured, template-driven system with one place to find SOWs, budgets, and change orders.

Conclusion

This engagement shows what happens when a growing agency treats its PMO as something worth building deliberately, rather than a set of habits to work around. Replacing ad hoc tools and manual tracking with a structured Jira and Confluence setup gave the agency the consistency and visibility it needs to keep taking on bigger, more complex client work, without losing the flexibility that made it successful in the first place.

If your team is outgrowing its current tools and processes, reach out to Stalworx to find out how we can help your organization be our next success.