Case Study - How Secret Escapes improved visibility and
reduced Cycle Time by 75%

The Challenge

Secret Escapes is one of the great success stories in the UK travel industry, and the engineering team has seen rapid growth organically and through acquisition.

Eirik Pettersen, CTO, is faced with the challenge of scaling his onshore and nearshore DevOps and Agile capability whilst enabling his teams to continue to be self-managing and maintain the speed and quality of delivery that the business has come to expect.

Plandek sits at the heart of Secret Escapes delivery organization, providing critical engineering, DevOps and talent data and insights to their management teams.Secret Escapes can now focus teams on the most important KPIs for the business:

1. Cycle Time (speed to market)
2. Deployment Frequency (DevOps maturity)
3. Engineering Health (People/Talent monitoring)

Each team has built custom dashboards in Plandek that they regularly review with team members and leadership, providing key insights against the business’s KPIs and those areas that are unique to each team as they continue to build toward Engineering Excellence.

Most importantly, Plandek has enabled Secret Escapes engineering and delivery teams to become data-driven in their approach to Agile delivery, using data to drive decision-making as opposed to instinct and gut feel.

Over the past 24 months, Secret Escapes have:

1. Reduced hot fixes in Prod by 54%
2. Reduced Cycle Time by 75%
3. Doubled commit frequency by Engineers
4. 15% increase in deployments per day (per pipeline)

Secret Escapes’ Team Pulse surveys are executed in Plandek (via Slack) and provide regular updates on team health, ensuring their engineering teams are motivated, enabled and feeling positive about their environment and the work they are doing.