At any moment in time, every CIO should be able to answer the questions, “What are we working on as a company long-term?”, “Will it result in customer value?”, “How should we allocate resources across our priorities?” and “What are blockers, dependencies, and risks to our desired strategic outcomes?”. But answering those questions, especially in a large enterprise organization, is not as simple as it sounds.
Atlassian is committed to helping our customers answer these questions with our enterprise agile planning tool, Jira Align. Jira Align helps our largest enterprise customers connect strategy to execution at scale. Jira Align gives executives a “30,000-foot view” of the work teams are doing in Jira Software, and how it contributes to business outcomes – across their entire company portfolio.
Customers have trusted Jira Software to be the backbone of their software development work for over 20 years. Today, some of the largest companies in the world, including industry innovators such as H&M, Spotify, and Ford Motors, are using Jira Align to scale their agile practices beyond the team level, to span an entire enterprise organization. We are continuing to make it easier to make the case to adopt Jira Align:
- We recently ran a study with Forrester to analyze the total economic impact of Jira Align, which highlighted that it has helped our customers achieve up to 340% ROI! Read more about it here: Agile transformations with measurable impacts? Jira Align does that! – Work Life by Atlassian
- We’ve also received recognition from influential industry analysts as a 5-times leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Agile Planning tools and a Strong Performer in the Forrester Value Stream Management Wave.
- Among Fortune 100 US companies, Jira Align is adopted by 2 of the 3 automotive companies, 3 of the 5 pharmaceutical companies, and 3 of the 4 healthcare insurance and manager care companies.
But we are not stopping here, and we are excited to share that our Value Stream Management solution, built on Jira Align and initially announced at the Team’23 conference, is coming into general availability next month!
The Atlassian Value Stream Management solution
Even companies that connect work with strategy (Enterprise Agile Planning) and planning with rigor (Strategic Portfolio Management) can still waste a ton of time and money if the delivery of their carefully planned work is riddled with useless processes and bottlenecks.
Just consider this – even if you have a supercar, you can’t go anywhere when you are stuck in a traffic jam. You have to look around at all the other cars, construction, road closures, etc. to see why the fastest car can’t do what it was built to do: drive fast. The same is true for progressing work through an organization.
Earlier this year we launched the Atlassian Value Stream Management (VSM) solution that brings together the power of Jira Align with Enterprise Insights, Jira Software, and Atlassian Analytics, to give executives a view of those bottlenecks. Today we are enhancing that solution with out-of-the-box Value Stream Management dashboards that can be viewable in Atlassian Analytics, with data sourced from Jira Align Enterprise Insights. With these enhancements, the organizations will be able to capitalize on the full benefits of VSM:
- Get end-to-end visibility across your organization, from high-level insights to granular details, using data from multiple sources to get comprehensive reporting.
- Align work to outcomes, like OKRs, to surface non-value-add work and show a value stream’s impact.
- Streamline processes and eliminate bottlenecks by identifying dependencies and roadblocks, automating manual tasks, removing unnecessary steps, and stopping wasting resources.
- Measure the right things to set your team up for success by analyzing important metrics, such as team efficiency, customer impact, and software reliability and performance.
- Bring business, DevOps, and IT teams together to develop innovative software – from concept through delivery – with shared data and cross-functional teams.
Read more about the Atlassian Value Stream Management solution here: Value Stream Management Solution | Atlassian VSM | Atlassian
Continuing to add value to Jira Align
The new VSM solution showcases Atlassian’s continued investment into core Jira Align capabilities as we aspire to unlock your enterprise agility journey. Atlassian is committed to further developing the capabilities of Jira Align and enabling our customers to use it together with the rest of the Atlassian product suite and 3rd party tools.
Recent examples of continued focus in that area include:
- Expanded integrations that make it easier to plug in all your data to Jira Align. Whether it is from Jira Software or Azure DevOps, with Jira Align you have visibility across all of your teams and the tools they use to get their work done and how they contribute value to the business. We are looking to add more integrations soon!
- Better navigation experience that closely mirrors other Atlassian products, reduces time to access specific Align pages, and makes it easy to switch between products: A new navigation experience is coming to Jira Align!
- Focus on accessibility standards and updating Jira Align’s visual components to match the Atlassian Design System, resulting in improved accessibility for all of our users.
As we continue on this journey, we are grateful to partner with many of our Jira Align customers as advisors to help us combine the power of Jira Align and the Atlassian platform.
Powering transformations with a strong partner ecosystem
Jira Align and our VSM solution are underpinned by a strong partner ecosystem, with a proven track record of providing in-depth guidance with established practices, demonstrating technical expertise, and delivering customer success in helping enterprises overcome business agility challenges.
Most recently, we expanded a key partnership with Accenture to build on our existing collaboration and accelerate the ability of our largest customers to change their deeply rooted processes and turn them into meaningful changes for better business agility. Read more about the partnership here: Atlassian and Accenture are teaming up – Work Life by Atlassian
Learn more about our Agile at Scale specialized partners here: Specialization | Atlassian
Flowtopia 2023
To hear about the latest on Jira Align and the Atlassian VSM Solution, catch up with our team live at Flowtopia 2023 in Las Vegas, Nevada, on October 1-2. We will host a welcome reception on October 1 at 5:00 PM: https://flowtopia-reception.eventbrite.com. Experts from both Atlassian and Accenture will be available throughout the day at our sponsorship booth in the expo hall.
We will also conduct the following sessions:
- October 2, 2023 at 9:10-9:45 AM: Workshop with Atlassian and Accenture on how to baseline an organization’s readiness as part of the assess component of VSM implementation roadmap
- October 2, 2023 at 12:30 PM – 1:30 PM: Join us for a sponsored lunch at Flowtopia where you can hear a 10 minute lightning talk on how to drive alignment between product and software teams with VSM and network over lunch with your peers as well as VSM experts from Atlassian and Accenture.