HII NeXt is a company-wide initiative that has been a game-changer for our business and a key discriminator in our proposals. More than 1,300 customers, partners and project teams from Mission Technologies and HII’s shipbuilding divisions use the system—a figure that continues to grow. What is HII NeXt? It is a sophisticated, secure, cloud-based design and development eco-system that is being used across HII programs both internally and externally.

The Systems, Integration and Test organization within Mission Technologies’ Unmanned Systems business group uses Jira within the HII NEXT platform daily. “The tool enables us to standardize our approach to test management, making it repeatable, reliable and maintainable for our entire organization,” said Jason Sempsrott, head of systems, integration and test. “The tool also allows us to report progress more easily and makes sharing information significantly better than emails, slide decks and verbal communications. The tool improves efficiency, and we continually look for opportunities to expand its usage within our business group and across other disciplines both within Unmanned Systems and across the larger HII.”

Challenge

The Systems, Integration and Test division consists of three organizations: Systems, Integration and Test, and Field Service Engineering. A critical responsibility of these organizations is to manage the testing of equipment and verify equipment performance to system requirements for sales contracts. Because of the volume of contracts being executed daily, a reliable methodology for tracking test progress throughout a contract was needed. The HII NEXT Jira platform is the primary vehicle for managing all test activities.

Solution

For those unfamiliar with the Jira platform, it is an intuitive, web-based platform designed to make, share, manage, task and archive work activities in a consistent and manageable way. Every contract  requires an assessment of the equipment purchased. Next test activities required are identified to verify and validate the equipment prior to delivery. At the start of a contract, the HII NEXT Jira platform is used to quickly generate test tickets, and a dashboard is used to manage the test activities. The resulting dashboard allows for sharing status with program stakeholders on testing progress throughout the entirety of the contract’s execution. The built-in features of Jira enable users to filter, find, manage, track and status key pieces of information quickly and easily.

Benefit

The HII NEXT Jira platform improved efficiency significantly since implementing the workflows last year. The Systems, Integration and Test organization continues to look for additional opportunities to expand its usage across our business group and welcome the opportunity to share, teach and guide other organizations in its features and capabilities.

 For more information, visit hii.com/next or email Kimera Weese, chief strategist and program lead for HII NEXT, at kimera.weese@hii-tsd.com.