Scaling agility with Atlassian Jira Align

As software becomes business critical across industries, requirements for quality and feature become higher too. For the organization to be able to efficiently respond to high requirements, there needs to be a common goal regarding and an understanding of what we are doing, and why. With the right tools, companies can effectively scale their agility within the organization.

Challenges in scaling agility

One of the biggest challenges organizations confront is scaling Agility. Often, during Scaled Agile transformations, teams become faster and better at estimating their work. However, not scaling that agility properly can lead to duplicate work. It can also mean that teams focus on work that isn’t important from a strategic point of view.

In the end, all of this means money down the drain.

Lack of visibility across the organization

Another challenge organizations run into is the lack of visibility across the organization and teams. Gartner mentions in their report “Critical Capabilities for Enterprise Agile Planning Tools” (2019) that many organizations have tools for tracking Agile work at a team level, but not across different portfolios, which decreases the benefits of the tools.

One typical example is when business management lacks visibility of IT operations. The business department may require new features for a piece of software, without understanding that the development team is already fully utilized or there may be dependencies that need to be resolved.

Without visibility, it becomes difficult for a company to plan for the future and respond to market changes.

A lack of visibility of customer outcomes is a further challenge, one that hinders business management from seeing the value stream of a product. What kind of value does developing a certain feature bring to the end user? This lack of visibility makes it difficult for organizations to prioritize the development of features that could increase the customer loyalty, which could be measured by a Net Promoter Score (NPS).

What is Jira Align?

To confront these challenges, Atlassian has added a new tool to its tool stack: Jira Align. It was previously known as AgileCraft, which has been solving customers’ Agility at Scale problems for a decade already.

Jira Align helps to create visibility across the whole organization and align teams with the organization’s objectives and strategy. This way, organizations can make fast, real-time decisions.

Jira Align has over 100 integrated reports and metrics that help companies track and analyze their work at every level of scale. Some of the reports that can be generated from Jira Align include:

• burndown and burnup charts
• investment reports
• cross-program and cross-portfolio dependency maps.

The reports are automatically generated by Jira Align and are available at any time, without the need to spend time and effort on manually creating the report.

Taking a bird’s eye view, the tool aligns product management, software development and strategic portfolios with each other. We’d recommend Jira Align for large organizations that want to ensure that the whole organization is working in an Agile way.

It doesn’t only give visibility across all the teams, but also helps in catching and fixing problems early on.

A note on Eficode ROOT Insights, a DevOps analytics solution

We’ve noticed that typical Agile planning tools are missing end-to-end visibility of the software production line. Continuous improvement of production requires transparency and real-time metrics, as these lay a foundation for decisions. Our new ROOT Insights tool offers built-in dashboards for key management, quality, development, and operations metrics.

These metrics provided by Eficode ROOT Insights combined with Jira Align give companies an even deeper understanding of their software development activities.

Are you interested in Jira Align?

Eficode is one of the first Atlassian partners in Europe to provide Jira Align for its clients. Did you know that we also help organizations during Scaled Agile and DevOps transformations? To learn more and get started with Jira Align, don’t hesitate to contact us!