Achieving Enterprise Agility With Jira Align

Long-term success as an entrepreneur or CEO depends on having a clear grasp of the value your firm produces, why it does so, and how it does it. You can’t have a strategic vision if you can’t see what is being accomplished across the board in the organisation. As a result, you won’t always be able to tell whether to change course or when it would be wise to intensify a certain effort. 

However, team members who have “boots on the ground” gain a lot from being able to see even the most high-level plan directing the company. Studies have demonstrated that elevating employee performance, engagement, and morale involves having a clear knowledge of the corporate objectives. It displays where their efforts fit into the larger picture. They comprehend the rationale behind pivotal decisions, which makes it simpler and more likely for them to support the change. You can learn more by checking out the Agile training online.

Why does Jira Align work so well for delivering this visibility?

Jira Align is a piece of software developed by Atlassian specifically to assist businesses wishing to scale their Agile processes across the board. Jira Align is a highly flexible platform that syncs data with existing Atlassian Jira or Azure DevOps systems to enable top-down and bottom-up visibility throughout the entire organisation for businesses that already use these tools. 

Pivot or persevere decisions

Jira Align assists managers in making “pivot or persevere” decisions. It gives one the assurance to comprehend how a business is now providing value so that, when a pivot is required, the inevitable decline in productivity can be anticipated and planned for. 

A large organisation making a turn is comparable to a large ship navigating a turn at sea. It takes a lot of time and effort. It is tougher for them to successfully command that movement the farther away the “admiral” is from the bridge. The admiral has immediate access to everything they need to make and control that pivot thanks to Jira Align, who places them right on the bridge.

We’ll explain how Jira Align provides this degree of enterprise-wide visibility in the following sections of this article.

Executive level visibility

Jira Align gives executives a place to outline and elaborate the organisation’s top-level strategy as well as the business’s purpose, vision, and values. This tactical basis becomes public once it is entered into the system. Each element of the strategy is also directly related to broad strategic themes, which are further broken down into features, portfolio epics, programs epics, and ultimately stories and tasks. In this manner, it will be possible to immediately link every team activity to a major strategic objective that the company is pursuing.

Jira Align modules that offer this visibility include some of the following:

• Strategic Backlog: Develop and maintain broad strategic themes that describe the company’s priorities for the next one to three years. These themes are sufficiently detailed to guarantee that they are consistent with the organisation’s goal, vision, and values. Additionally, room is given to create high-level OKRs that will aid in evaluating the theme when feedback data is received.
• Work Tree: To assess how strategic themes are developing in connection to OKRs, and break them down into the numerous epics and associated pieces of work. Do you deliver value? Does it suffice to support spending, or are changes necessary?
• OKR: OKR Tree Leaders will utilise OKRs as their “eyes and ears” to monitor the effect they are having on the market. To assess whether their current strategic themes are paying off. 
• Strategy Room: Data from all the sources mentioned above and more are combined in one single, unified area to create a highly visual picture of high-level strategy and the progress being made in real-time toward accomplishing strategic goals. Inside Jira Align, this is where attentive executive leadership will frequently reside.

Portfolio level visibility

Strategic themes can be divided into different portfolios of work once they have been established and prioritised. From there, portfolio managers will develop and oversee epics intended to satisfy OKRs, which show the business is accomplishing its strategic objectives. These epics will then be divided into backlogs of epics, which established teams of teams will work on at the program level. Jira Align’s visibility means that even two layers below, all the units of work created will directly align to the highest level of strategy.

Here are some examples of modules that provide visibility at the portfolio level:

• Strategic Roadmap: capture the tactics being pursued by the portfolio quickly and visually. To understand how everything is connected, every element from the strategic themes is displayed along with its portfolio and program epics.
• Portfolio Epic Lifecycle: Program managers have access to the following portfolio epic details on this screen: estimate, WSJF/priority, features, and objectives. When used in PI planning and monitoring, this can be effective.
• Program Backlog: Program managers can further rank and improve features when they are added to the backlog to be delivered during the PI. Ranking, estimating, and WSJF analysis can all be done using drag-and-drop or a right-click on the backlog. All those facts are also visible to portfolio managers because it is directly related to the portfolio epics.

Program level visibility

As mentioned above, program managers have access to higher-level strategic themes, goals, and OKRs as well as the epics of the portfolio. The same is true for teams and portfolio managers, who can focus on epics and features at the program level to track work in real time and use that data for all-encompassing decision-making. 

Program managers and other people can benefit greatly from the following excellent modules:

• Feature Record: A description, target sprint and scheduling milestones, an estimate, information about the product it’s tied to, the total number of stories, risks, dependencies, objectives, and acceptance criteria are all included in the feature record module, which delves deeply into each feature. This knowledge can be quite helpful for composing stories, among other things.
• Program Room: Another streamlined and very visual method of organising and managing work throughout a PI in real-time is the program room. From portfolio epics down to individual stories and tasks, all the work in past, present, and future PIs can be displayed here.

Team level visibility

All of this comes together during the data sync between Jira Align and Jira or Azure DevOps. It enables all of the data generated by the two systems to cross-populate, giving teams using Jira or AD constant access to information about the work that has been prioritised or created in Jira Align. The WHY button that is located at the top of each ticket makes this feasible. 

Managers and product owners using Jira Align also have continuous access to information about how well all strategic themes, portfolio epics, program epics, features, and associated OKRs are being produced.

Conclusion

Using Jira Align is highly advised if your company is actively pursuing Enterprise Agility. It is an effective instrument that can assist you in carrying out your plan and creating value in the way you anticipated. Check out the Agile certification course to learn more.