Jira's flexibility, scalability, and integration capabilities make it a powerful tool that different teams can adapt to their specific needs. Project managers are no strangers to this reality. The hospitality industry, with its hectic day-to-day operations, focused on guest satisfaction, recognizes the importance of project organization and operational efficiency. This blog will explore how multinational hospitality industry companies can find help in Jira to manage their project portfolio across different teams and geographies.
The constant modernization of operations, ensuring collaboration across teams, and delivering exceptional service are very important to this industry. By tailoring Jira to these very specific needs, the hospitality industry can achieve greater efficiency and evolve faster, maintaining its position at the forefront of innovation.
More specifically, the entire hospitality industry, particularly hotels, uses different software solutions to control, centralize, modernize, and align operations across different teams. Managing aspects of maintenance tasks and upgrades is another significant challenge faced by companies in this industry. Additionally, tasks such as event and conference planning, customized guest experiences, marketing campaigns, data management, and compliance management are also crucial. All of these require an overall view of different projects and the ability to provide the right visibility to the right people at the right time.
Customizing Jira for day-to-day hotel operations involves tailoring workflows, creating custom fields, and leveraging integrations to address the unique needs of the hospitality industry. In this way, hotels can create a centralized system to empower their operations teams, enhance guest satisfaction, and enable employees to excel in their roles. The flexibility of Jira makes it an invaluable tool for tackling day-to-day challenges in the hospitality industry.
How hotels can organize and control their operations:
A great example of hotels using Jira is Meliá Hotels International, a Spanish multinational hotel company with more than 10,000 employees across 40 countries. It's one of the largest hotel companies in the world, particularly well-known within the resort sector.
Meliá uses Jira with more than 2,000 users, primarily focusing on task management, service logging, and tracking projects of diverse origins. As reported by Meliá, adopting Jira and customizations has optimized the way middle managers handle operations, enhancing their productivity and enabling faster decision-making based on the reports the tool provides. Additionally, it has saved time and costs by implementing project-focused solutions from the Atlassian Marketplace, avoiding the need for custom developments in Jira's configuration. This simplification has streamlined communication between teams and roles.
As Meliá was using Jira to manage day-to-day tasks and Jira Service Management and Jira Software to track projects, they needed to escalate the tool usage across different roles and teams. They aimed to unify the management of all their projects, allowing managers to have focused strategic control and abandon other tools like Excel files and BI systems. The goal was to centralize all information within Jira.
This challenge also required unifying project terminology, standardizing functionality across the entire project portfolio, and centralizing information.
To address these needs, Meliá chose a series of solutions from the Atlassian Marketplace, all of them with the main end to offer more focus on the project portfolio management. One of them, Projectrak offered significant time and cost savings by avoiding lengthy and complex Jira configurations at the project level and starting working from minute one. It simplified communication and streamlined workflows across teams and roles.
The solution Meliá chose to address their unique challenges was to create a centralized platform to oversee all projects and make operations cohesive across the entire company. More specifically, they achieved this based on three important pillars:
Meliá's experience demonstrates how Jira, when customized to specific needs, can take your project management to the next level, especially for organizations with large project portfolios. The hospitality industry, particularly those focused on coordinating team efforts to deliver exceptional guest experiences, can benefit from this approach. Among the learnings applicable to the whole industry, we could mention:
For Meliá Hotels, adopting a platform like Jira and adding other Atlassian Marketplace solutions such as Projectrak wasn't just a technological upgrade; it represented a significant shift in the way they manage their business, a key milestone in their digital transformation journey. These tools enabled them to scale their operations and address the global challenges faced by businesses today, allowing them to remain agile in an increasingly competitive market.
The hospitality industry as a whole can benefit from following Meliá's lead. Whether you're managing a small hostel, a boutique chain, or a global hotel brand, investing in software for project portfolio management will unlock new levels of efficiency, collaboration, and ultimately, increased business success.