Intapp gains engineering investment visibility and 3x focus on strategic innovation with Allstacks

Background

Intapp software helps professionals unlock their teams’ knowledge, relationships, and operational insights to increase value for their firms. Using the power of Applied AI, Intapp makes firm and market intelligence easy to find, understand, and use. With Intapp’s portfolio of vertical SaaS solutions, professionals can apply their collective expertise to make smarter decisions, manage risk, and increase competitive advantage. The world's top firms — across accounting, consulting, investment banking, legal, private capital, and real assets — trust Intapp’s industry-specific platform and solutions to modernize and drive new growth. 

Challenges

As Intapp scaled rapidly - transitioning to a publicly traded entity with a vision of becoming a billion-dollar enterprise - the need for clear visibility into engineering investments became critical. Rick Cox, Technical Program Director at Intapp, and his R&D Operations group struggled to understand where engineering time was allocated and couldn’t align those efforts with strategic business goals. 

The Intapp team needed to actually break down how engineers were spending their time: how much effort was on innovation versus maintenance or technical debt? The problem was compounded by the need to plan allocations quarterly. The team was regularly forced to guess headcount needs for critical areas like innovation and maintenance because it lacked the definitive data. "Our number one problem was having true visibility into where our engineering resources were being spent," Rick explained. 

Solution

To bring clarity to their decision-making and better understand the shape of their engineering investments, the Intapp team turned to Allstacks, a comprehensive software engineering intelligence platform. Allstacks' capability to categorize and visualize engineering investments, including actual time spent versus planned allocations, was particularly valuable. Intapp utilized Allstacks’ hierarchical tagging feature extensively, enabling automated categorization of tickets and tasks, which significantly improved reporting accuracy and enabled leadership to make better informed decisions during regular planning cycles. 

Intapp also needed a way to see exactly where their engineering effort was going despite dealing with imperfect data hygiene and using multiple project management tools across teams - a characteristic that’s extremely common for large organizations delivering software today. To that end, it was important for them to find a solution that integrated smoothly with their existing tooling and had the ability to normalize engineering data across their teams without requiring significant process changes, which was a key differentiator that competitor solutions lacked. 

"The data hygiene hurdle was significant," Rick admitted. "But it forced us to adopt better practices across teams.” And because Allstacks integrated smoothly with Intapp’s existing tooling, including Jira and Azure DevOps, the team could just get to work without worry. “Having a tool that could handle complex scenarios—like multiple Azure DevOps instances and Jira projects—was a game changer.”

Impact

Since implementing Allstacks, Intapp has seen dramatic improvements in visibility and strategic alignment:

• Quantified insights: "The biggest change has been having actual data," Cox emphasized. Intapp's engineering teams transitioned from guesswork to data-backed decisions.
  • With the additional clarity into where engineering effort was actually going for the first time, Intapp’s collaboration team saw a 2x increase in their focus on strategic innovation compared to quarter over quarter data from the previous year, while their compliance team saw a 3x increase in focus on strategic innovation over the same time period.

• Enhanced strategic conversations: The Allstacks platform enabled clear discussions around engineering allocations. "We could finally ask questions like, 'Why are we planning 20% on maintenance, but actuals show differently?' This clarity helps us shift more resources towards innovation," said Rick.
• Cross-functional visibility: Unexpectedly, Allstacks has gained strong interest from product managers within Intapp, enhancing communication between engineering and product teams. The milestone view that shows all deliverables in a single place, in particular, facilitated strategic conversations about project tracking and roadmap alignment.

This indicates that with better visibility and reliable data, the most important work is getting the right amount of attention, planning cycles are more efficient, and leaders can be confident when making data-backed decisions that impact the business.

Advice to Other Teams

Rick’s advice to organizations facing similar challenges emphasizes the importance of rigorous data management: "Get a handle on your data. Visibility into actual engineering work versus planned allocations is essential for strategic alignment and scaling effectively."

Looking Forward

With Allstacks firmly integrated into their workflow, Intapp continues to expand its usage across teams. Future initiatives include deeper exploration of additional metrics such as PR cycle times and code review effectiveness to drive continuous improvement across their engineering organization.