SPRINT & RELEASE PLANNING

Information technology is taking a scrum approach to the ongoing development of VICE’s global support portal. Feature requests, workflow optimizations, teams to onboard, solutions to add, and bug fixes will be added to the backlog for future release. Each backlog item will undergo a requirement gathering stage to determine value, complexity, and level of effort needed. Backlog items will then be organized into repeatable work cycles, called Sprints:

• Work is prioritized by the product owner who will capture the needed requirement documentation.

• Before each release, Process Owners and Subject-Matter- Experts (SMEs) conduct user acceptance testing (UAT) to verify the solution is built or fixed as intended.

• Release notes follow each Sprint release into Production.

VICE News Project Inquiries

• Who: All VICE FTE & freelance employees can raise inquiries into VICE News Projects.

• What: Requesters can raise questions regarding Projects for their shoots.

• Where: The form can be found on the VICE Support Portal (support.vice.com) under the Service Catalog under VICE News Production category and Report an Incident icon on requesters' homepage, VICE News Production Incident Category

• Why: Previous support requests existed as direct emails to individuals and now support requests have been centralized into the VICE Support portal for easier requester access and better visibility. Agents supporting this process now have a central repository for all incoming requests.

Refinery29 CMS Support

• Who: All VICE FTE & freelance employees can raise support requests for Refinery29 CMS.

• What: VICE Product & Engineering Team has merged with Refinery29 Product Team and now they support Refinery29 CMS, Site Issues, Permissions and Other queries.

• Where: The form can be found on the VICE Support Portal (support.vice.com) under the Service Catalog under VICE Product & Engineering category.

• Why: Refinery29 CMS Team used Zendesk for Refinery29 product support tickets and it created confusion among employees. This was redundant as VICE has used VICE SupportIT and Product support issues.

Combined Contingent Worker Approval Form

• Who: All VICE FTE & freelance employees can request a new Contingent Worker to be on-boarded.

• What: Previously, Contingent Worker requests required 2 forms to be submitted and approved. This combined form allowed for only 1 form to be submitted as well as an automated User Tech Account (Okta & Google) creation, after approval of the request.

• Where: The form can be found on the VICE Support Portal (support.vice.com) under the Service Catalog under the HR Services category.

• Why: This Combined Contingent Worker Approval Form streamlines the requester experiencing, requiring only 1 form be submitted to create User Tech Accounts. An automated Account provisioning workflow was created as well as an updated Approval Matrix.

• 225 Broadway Facilities Manager has been on-boarded into the Facilities Team of the VICE Support Portal and has adopted existing Facilities Team workflows.

• Removed the "Access to FTP Server" request from Service Categories as this service is no longer available.