How Prometric Saved Weeks of Manual Reporting Time With Real-Time Engineering Insights in Optimal AI

FineTune, a subsidiary of Prometric, unified Jira + GitHub into a real-time source of truth, unlocking 50% faster cycle times, hours of productivity regained, and audit-ready billing accuracy for client initiatives.

At A Glance: The Impact

• ~50% Faster PR Cycle Time: Time to open, review, and merge dropped dramatically.
• 40+ Hours Saved Per Year per Person: Manual spreadsheet reporting was completely eliminated.
• 100% Financial Accuracy: Replaced "story-point guesswork" with real activity data for capitalization.

"It’s like working with your eyes open. I’m no longer the bottleneck... all teams have direct access to insights in real-time."

— Kat Heath, Director of Project Management, Prometric

Prometric’s Engineering Org Was Running on Spreadsheets.

FineTune, a Prometric subsidiary, builds mission-critical edtech products used across schools and assessment programs. Their engineering organization led by VP of Engineering Steve Picciano, Director of Project Management Kat Heath, and senior engineering leader Steve Maggs, supports multiple Scrum and Kanban teams responsible for continuous delivery across a wide product portfolio.

Before Optimal AI, engineering insights were fragmented across Jira, GitHub, and spreadsheets. Reporting depended on Kat manually reconciling data every few weeks, leaving the entire org with lagging indicators, limited visibility, and no verifiable way to connect engineering effort to client billing.

Within weeks, the team saw a 50% reduction in PR Time to Open, 40% faster reviews, and accurate, audit-ready billing data that finance could rely on. Developers gained self-serve visibility, leadership eliminated manual reporting bottlenecks, and the engineering org shifted from reactive to real-time decision-making.

The Challenge: All the Data, None of the Insight

Before Optimal AI, tracking engineering health was a retrospective, labor-intensive process. While the teams were agile, the data was siloed.

• The Problem: Reporting required half a day of manual data entry every few weeks.
• Lagging Indicators: Insights were only generated after sprints ended, making mid-flight pivots impossible.
• Subjective Financials: Client billing and cost capitalization relied on story point estimates and perceived scope rather than actual effort. This created a "paper trail" that lacked hard data verification.

“Optimal is the first place I go when I need to understand what’s happening in our teams. I use it constantly. Everything I need is right there, and it’s given us a level of clarity we never had before.”

— Kat Heath, Director of Project Management

The Solution: Real-Time Visibility

Optimal AI integrated FineTune’s Jira and GitHub data into a "single pane of glass," removing the manual labor of data correlation and empowering the team with transparency.

Key implementations included:

• Unified Teams View: Dynamic dashboards for "Strike Teams" (hybrid squads pulled from various departments).
• Allocation Intelligence: Instant confirmation of active team members and PR review distribution.
• Pipeline Velocity: Using PR Cycle Time as a core KPI to ensure work moves through the engineering and product pipeline without stalling.

The Results:

1. Drastic Reduction in Cycle Times

By putting metrics directly in the hands of the developers, the team began self-correcting mid-sprint. In a recent 30-day interval comparison, the velocity improvements were significant:

• 50% Drop in Time to Open (PRs).
• 40% Drop in Time to Review.
• 45% Drop in Time to Merge.

“Optimal puts the data directly in our developers’ hands. They can course-correct mid-sprint and understand the narrative behind their work instantly.”

— Kat Heath, Director of Project Management

2. Precision Billing Powered by Actual Engineering Activity

One of the most valuable, unexpected wins for Prometric was the revolution in financial accuracy. Previously, billing clients for specific initiatives was based on estimates.

With Optimal AI, FineTune now maps the exact percentage of developer time to specific initiatives. This provides the accounting department with a definitive paper trail for invoices, moving the organization from "perceived scope" to "hard numbers."

3. 40+ Hours Returned to Leadership

By eliminating the manual collation of data, leadership regained significant bandwidth.

• 40+ Hours Saved Annually per team member on manual reporting tasks.
• Instant Context: The team no longer digs through months-old data to reconstruct history; the narrative is available instantly via the timeline and AI insights.

With AI Insights, developers and managers can now:

• See the TL;DR instantly: AI narrates what the metrics mean, so anyone can understand the story behind the data at a glance.
  
• Spot issues in seconds: Team members can click directly into an insight to see where bottlenecks or anomalies are happening without waiting for Kat to investigate or prepare a report.
  
• Find context without digging: No more need to search through months of GitHub or Jira history; AI Insights surfaces the “why” behind trends immediately.
  
• Self-correct mid-sprint: Teams adjust in real-time because they can finally see what’s worth paying attention to as it’s happening.

“There’s a lot of density of data and one of the things I want my teams to be able to do is understand the narrative that the data is telling us. AI Insights is a way for somebody who’s not used to looking at data and metrics as their core job… it really provides that context. That’s really, really powerful for our dev teams.”

— Kat Heath, Director of Project Management

Why FineTune Runs Better With Optimal AI

Optimal AI gave FineTune a new way to run engineering. What used to take half a day of spreadsheets is now instant. What used to be guesswork in client billing is now verifiable.

• Developers click into an Insight and see exactly what to pay attention to.
• Leads spot bottlenecks before they become blockers.
• Finance gets hard numbers instead of story-point assumptions.
• Leadership finally operates with eyes wide open.

As Kat put it:

"Before bringing on Optimal, we were focused on the work right in front of us. This tool has allowed us to create a more powerful, robust engineering team... It’s really powerful for our dev teams."

— Kat Heath, Director of Project Management