How Advanced Roadmaps helps Atlassian gain insights across teams

How Atlassian’s Cloud Foundations division used Advanced Roadmaps across teams in order to plan and track more effectively

Chandler Harris Szerző: Chandler Harris
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Screenshot of Consistent Hierarchy

Plus, Advanced Roadmaps allows the Cloud Foundations teams to leverage categorization for greater visibility and tracking. They use custom fields and labels to categorize by team, strategic pillar, timeframe, and more.

“Having a consistent view of custom fields and labels across the board gives a consistent view across all our teams in Cloud Foundations,” Romain said.

Screenshot of Leveraging Categorization

Overall, Advanced Roadmaps gives Romain and his team the following benefits:

Teams spend more time doing and less time reporting

Filters and saved views provide different snapshots based on real-time data from Jira Software. Before using Advanced Roadmaps, the Cloud Foundations department had to pull data from numerous sources. Now when Romain’s teams receive a request from stakeholders to display different overviews, they can easily pull from Advanced Roadmaps.

Dynamic planning

When Cloud Foundations underwent a reorganization, it took Romain just over an hour to transition his old planning data into his new plans, simply by adjusting the Advanced Roadmaps filters. “I didn't have to go in and change a whole bunch of Confluence pages or reports or roadmaps,” he said. “I simply changed the JQL filters that drove my advanced roadmaps.”

Advanced Roadmaps now allows Romain to build a roadmap based on work from multiple Jira boards, projects, and filters. Additional levels of hierarchy can be created above the epic level, allowing him to connect epics from different teams or Jira projects to a single feature. Plus, Advanced Roadmaps provides the ability to build different versions of a plan.

Variable views/audiences for reports

The labeling and custom fields in Advanced Roadmaps helps Romain easily reorganize data in different ways. “When I get a different question from some of my senior stakeholders, I can look at the existing data we have and get them that information without interrupting my teams,” he said. The following is an example of an Advanced Roadmap report Romain can create by using strategic pillars across different teams to understand how much time is dedicated to a specific OKR.

Distribution of Effort

Tips to use Advanced Roadmaps like Atlassian

Romain’s experience using Advanced Roadmaps taught him a few key things:

Start small, add complexity later

In order to get value as quickly as possible Romain worked with his teams to build a “big rock” initiative roadmap for the year. This allowed them to communicate work in progress mapped to specific goals (via labels). At the beginning of the following quarter, the teams turned their planned initiatives into epics and adjusted the plan as needed. This helped create a clear map of each team’s work and timelines for completion.

After alignment was established, teams added dependencies in Advanced Roadmaps that highlighted delivery risks, the complexity of work, and team capacity. This revealed if teams were overextended or underutilized and provided insight into what was being prioritized.

Embed in team rituals

In order to establish Advanced Roadmaps across the entire Cloud Foundations department, it was important to use it in team rituals. This encouraged team members to make frequent updates. When teams met for sprint planning meetings and needed to communicate priorities and dependencies, they turned to their Advanced Roadmaps plan.

Make Advanced Roadmaps the single source of truth

Romain ensured that Advanced Roadmaps was used as the single source of truth for any communication or reporting to stakeholders. He leveraged add-ons like Google Sheets for Jira to pull the data from Advanced Roadmaps and Jira Software, which allowed him to display data in the formats/reports requested by stakeholders. This significantly reduced the amount of time for creating reports and ensured a single source for all things planning.