This article is a session recap based on Accenture Global IT’s session “From Jira Align to Strategy Collection: How Accenture Rewired Leadership Visibility with Focus + Goals” presented at Team ’26 in Anaheim, CA.

Accenture Global IT supports 775,000 employees, runs 500,000+ user stories per year across 240 products, and has over 3,000 Jira Align users. But senior leaders needed a more practical way to leverage delivery information to support strategic reviews and decisions.

Sound familiar?

Execution truth ≠ strategic clarity

Jira Align gave Accenture Global IT exactly what it’s designed to deliver: a reliable, real-time picture of what teams are doing and where issues are emerging. They compounded year-over-year reductions in cycle time. They scaled OKR adoption across thousands of teams.

But here’s the paradox their success created: more OKRs just meant more noise for the people who needed signal the most.

Leadership conversations stayed anchored in progress summaries and static decks, the exact format where context gets lost, information goes stale, and trust erodes.

The shift: from aggregation to curation

Instead of adding yet another dashboard, Accenture Global IT is making a fundamentally different design choice. They’re moving from aggregating everything to curating what matters. That means separating operational detail from strategic signal, so leaders can focus on the goals, risks, and dependencies that actually need their attention.

They introduced the Atlassian Strategy Collection as a layered system:

  • Jira Align stays the execution backbone — where teams plan, deliver, and track. It remains the system of delivery truth, not something leaders have to mine for every decision.
  • Focus is becoming the leadership control tower — curated OKR views, better context, clearer signals. It gives executives a curated view of what is on track, what is at risk, and where their decisions can change the outcome.
  • Goals acts as an automated bridge, syncing execution data upward without manual effort. That gives leaders a cleaner line of sight into progress without asking teams to duplicate updates in separate reporting rituals.

Different views for different decisions

The key insight: different altitudes require different experiences, not just different slices of the same dashboard.

Teams need to know how to deliver. Product leaders need to know why they’re building and whether the trade-offs they’re making are improving outcomes. Executives need to decide where to invest, where to intervene, and what to stop. Trying to serve all three with the same view guarantees none of them gets what they need.

For Accenture Global IT’s CIO leadership, that means turning Focus into a place for clearer operating conversations:

  • Live strategy reviews instead of static readouts, so leaders are working from current execution signals rather than last week’s slide deck
  • Matrixed views that pivot by funding, org structure, or initiative scope, making it easier to see whether investment and delivery are aligned
  • Decision-ready signals tied directly to execution so leaders can spot risk, compare trade-offs, and intervene when it actually matters

The culture piece no one can skip

Accenture Global IT’s sharpest lesson: OKRs stick when leaders model the behaviors behind them, from setting fewer priorities to having sharper trade-off conversations and stopping work that no longer serves the strategy.

They’re also investing heavily in role-based enablement, leader-by-leader rollouts, and sustained reinforcement because adoption depends on leaders changing how they run reviews, ask questions, and use OKRs to make prioritization visible.

Accenture Global IT is moving away from more reporting and toward fewer, sharper conversations: fewer OKRs in view, clearer discussions, and live data instead of stale slides. In practice, reviews are becoming less about explaining what happened and more about deciding what to protect, change, or stop.

Four takeaways for any enterprise

Accenture Global IT’s experience distills into four key takeaways for any enterprise pursuing strategy at scale:

  1. Scaling OKRs requires scaling focus. More objectives without intentional curation just creates noise. Treat strategy as a living practice, not a static artifact.
  2. Aligning separate systems of record creates a system of insight. It’s the connection between execution truth and curated leadership views that generates real signal, not any single tool.
  3. Tools don’t make OKRs stick – leadership behavior does. Sustained investment in how leaders question and make decisions turns OKRs into a living practice instead of a compliance exercise.
  4. The last mile of strategy is executive understanding. Perfect data at the wrong altitude changes nothing. Design for how leaders actually lead.

The bottom line

The gap between what teams execute and what leadership needs for decisions is only growing. Accenture Global IT’s approach shows that closing it starts with keeping the execution system intact while building a purpose-built leadership layer above it — one designed for how leaders actually lead.

Whether you’re scaling OKRs or building a clearer line of sight between strategy and outcomes, explore how Atlassian Strategy Collection can help turn execution data into leadership clarity.