As one of Kendis’ biggest customers, Nordea leads over 150 release trains and has about 5,000 Kendis users. According to Roy Boven, the Senior Process Specialist at Nordea, that number is “still growing, which is nice to see”. Roy and his colleague Adam Guja, a Scrum Master and Agile Coach at Nordea, joined the Kendis team to lead the webinar “How Nordea Transitioned to Full Remote PI Planning in Three Days with the Help of Kendis”. We discussed the realities behind remote PI Planning in a large company, and the ways they use Kendis to facilitate their ceremonies.

In early 2020, Nordea established pilot teams that would be the first to use Kendis. The company then designated three people to be an ‘internal Kendis support team’ as teams were learning to use the Kendis software. They were expecting to have 80 team members participate in the first Kendis PI Planning event.

As this was happening, the COVID-19 pandemic hit. All of the teams at Nordea were set to conduct in-person PI Planning within the next two weeks. One of their release trains found out about the travel ban on Friday, and their PI Planning was set for just three days later, on Monday. As teams scrambled to find a way to hold PI Planning remotely, many joined the pilot Kendis teams, and the expected 80 user test run soon turned into an 800 user event.

This is when Nordea realized Kendis was the best tool to facilitate remote PI Planning, and it quickly spread to be used company-wide. Nordea now has 5,000 active Kendis users!

Nordea uses self-hosted software and has upgraded their hardware to handle so many users. Roy says it was “actually quite easy to scale and easy to keep track”. They currently have two employees doing user support for all of their users. Collaboration combined with the use of Kendis help articles allows for their teams to work together to find the best uses for Kendis.

Nordea uses a full four level SAFe setup in JIRA. They have customized and upscaled aspects of their Kendis usage to accommodate their 20,000 Jira users.

As of the beginning of 2023, Roy says the company has reached a stable workflow with the usage and reliability of Kendis. Accessing the tool and also reaching out for support has become the norm for their teams. The main usage occurs 4 times a year, during the PI Planning cadence. Three weeks every quarter is spent planning, meaning new boards are created, board collections are moved or merged, and the overall workload within the tool is heavy. The rest of the year it is used for reporting, maintaining, and keeping track of the progress overview in each train.

According to Roy, most new users within the company are exposed to Kendis by word of mouth. The company has internal pages that include Nordea-specific information and guidelines. This includes specifics like how to connect to their Jira and when or when not to use resync. They also make sure to have links to Kendis support pages and introductory material easily accessible for their users.

The Kendis team is proud to serve customers like Nordea, who welcome open dialogue about their experiences with Kendis. Hearing customer perspectives allows us to improve our tool according to our users needs. As Roy said, “Kendis has matured a lot over the last three years”, and we are grateful to have customers like Nordea alongside us as we evolve. Thank you Roy and Adam!