Category: Platform Adoption & Governance

How to Streamline Strategic Planning in Jira Align – Part 1

Posted on September 7, 2023 by - Enterprise Operating Model, Platform Adoption & Governance

Strategic planning is essential for companies to align on priorities, establish goals, and measure performance. However, the process can often become complex and disjointed when managed through static documents and spreadsheets. Jira Align provides a powerful way to streamline strategic planning and enable real-time tracking of key initiatives.

In this post, we’ll walk through how to optimize strategic planning in Jira Align. We’ll cover:

  • Getting started with structuring objectives and initiatives
  • Developing dynamic roadmaps tied to your strategy
  • Fostering collaboration across teams
  • Tracking progress and measuring strategic impact
  • Ongoing best practices for maintaining alignment

Let’s dive in!

Getting started with strategic planning in Jira Align

The first step is structuring your strategy in Jira Align. 

Using OKRs

This involves setting up company objectives and key results (OKRs) to define measurable goals. You can then map initiatives and projects to each objective to operationalize your strategic plan.

When creating objectives, clearly define the desired outcome and how it will be measured. For example, an objective could be “Increase customer retention by 5% by Q4”.

With the objective set up, you can then establish key results—the quantifiable metrics that measure achievement of the goal. For our example, key results could be improving net promoter score to over 8.0, and decreasing churn rate below 10%.

Using Initiatives

Once your OKRs are established, you can start adding initiatives into Jira Align. Initiatives are the high-level programs and projects required to hit your objectives. 

Adding owners, estimates, and dependencies helps manage stakeholder involvement and execution.

Using permissions

You can also manage permissions in Jira Align to control who can view and edit various plans based on their role. This helps keep strategic plans visible to executives while allowing project teams to collaborate.

Developing strategic plans and roadmaps

One of the most powerful features in Jira Align is the ability to visualize strategic plans in roadmap form. This provides a high-level timeline of all initiatives mapped to objectives across planning horizons.

  • Establish milestones – Roadmaps can be structured across custom tiers to represent key milestones like quarterly goals, product releases, or project stages. 
  • Organize initiatives – Initiatives are then placed on their respective tiers based on estimated delivery dates.
  • Define dependencies – Project managers can define dependencies between initiatives to automatically sequence them. For example, an initiative to “Build CRM Integration” could be set to depend on “Complete Customer Database Migration” finishing first.
  • Experiment with scenarios – Jira Align enables scenario roadmapping with base case, aggressive, and conservative plans. This allows modeling tradeoffs to optimize investment mix and capacity planning.
  • Keep it up to date – As initiatives get underway, owners can update completion percentage to denote progress. Roadmaps auto-recalculate timelines when changes occur, keeping stakeholders aware of shifts.
  • Monitor and adjust – Different views like Gantt charts allow drilling into initiative details like assigned resources, budgets, and risks. Calendars make it easy to check for conflicts across resource utilization.
  • Share and report – Roadmaps can be shared via interactive dashboards or exported as presentation-ready slides. The visuals provide executives an end-to-end view of strategic plans, facilitating better decision making.

With Jira Align roadmapping, organizations gain a living, breathing plan that updates in real-time versus static documents. This enhances coordination across business units and teams to drive strategy execution.

Collaborating across teams in Jira Align

Strategic planning requires alignment between executives, managers, and frontline teams to be successful. Jira Align provides several ways to break down silos and improve cross-functional collaboration.

  • Interactive roadmap sharing – Initiative owners can share live roadmap views with other teams or groups. This fosters transparency into how their work ties into larger company goals and interdependent initiatives. Commenting allows discussions right on roadmaps.
  • Integrations with communication tools – Jira Align integrates with Confluence and Slack for real-time collaboration. Status updates made in Jira Align can automatically flow into Confluence docs or Slack channels. This keeps everyone looped in.
  • Managing stakeholders – Initiative owners can tag stakeholders from other groups. These stakeholders then receive alerts on progress updates related to their work, facilitating coordination.
  • Team progress reporting – Managers can pull progress reports filtered by team or department. This enables checking alignment across the organization and having data-driven conversations to resolve execution gaps.
  • Organization-wide access – With flexible permissions, Jira Align can provide company-wide transparency while limiting editing access as needed. This enables top-down and bottom-up visibility.

In summary, Jira Align breaks down team and departmental silos through seamless information sharing, notifications, integrations, and access controls. This leads to improved coordination and higher likelihood of successfully executing strategic plans enterprise-wide.

Tracking and measuring strategic plans

Jira Align provides robust capabilities for tracking objective progress and strategic plan KPIs in real-time.

Check out our four-part series on Jira Align reporting, starting with The Power of Team Level Reporting in Jira Align (Part 1 of 4).

Customizable dashboards offer at-a-glance views of portfolio health, budget-versus-actual costs, and completion percentage for company goals. Drilling into objectives shows up-to-date progress towards key results as well.

For a more detailed analysis, Jira Align’s reporting allows you to:

  • Monitor initiative delivery and identify late projects
  • Spot resource bottlenecks across plans
  • Analyze burn rates and forecast future progress
  • Track progress by department, product line or other dimensions
  • Export presentation-ready reports to update executives

As teams execute on initiatives, they can update progress directly on Jira Align roadmaps. This allows timelines to dynamically adjust based on real-world changes, keeping strategic plans reality-grounded.

For example, if a product launch gets delayed, initiative owners can easily drag-and-drop milestones on their roadmaps. Dependent initiatives then automatically shift based on the new timelines.

This lets organizations pivot gracefully versus rigidly sticking to outdated plans when business or market conditions change.

To maintain alignment, initiative owners can continually update key result metrics as outcomes are measured. Adding comments also enables teams to collaborate and provide context on progress changes.

With Jira Align’s robust tracking and measurement capabilities, organizations can closely monitor strategic plan effectiveness and rapidly adapt execution to drive better results. The key is maintaining up-to-date plans and making data-driven decisions based on real-time insights.

Tips for ongoing success

Here are some best practices to get continued value from Jira Align for strategic planning:

  • Review and update roadmaps quarterly – Set time on the calendar to evaluate progress and realign as needed.
  • Create templates for consistent plans – Build on templates each planning cycle rather than starting from scratch.
  • Automate data integrations – Link Jira Align to other systems to maintain up-to-date plans.
  • Assign initiative owners – Ensure every initiative has an owner responsible for execution.
  • Train all stakeholders – Provide training on Jira Align to foster adoption across the organization.

Following these tips will help ingrain Jira Align into your recurring strategic planning process.

In conclusion

Jira Align provides an optimized way to streamline strategic planning and gain organization-wide transparency. 

  • By structuring goals in Jira Align, teams gain clear line of sight into how their work ties back to company objectives.
  • With real-time roadmaps and progress tracking, organizations can dynamically adapt as business conditions change; cross-team alignment also improves through integrated planning.
  • Getting started with Jira Align involves laying out objectives, initiatives, and key results. From there, teams can develop roadmaps, collaborate across tools, and track progress towards strategic goals.
  • Following best practices around consistent reviews, updates, automation, and training will ensure continued success. 

With Jira Align, companies can connect high-level planning to execution and make strategic planning a living, breathing process. Stay tuned for Part 2, where we will consider How AI is Transforming Strategic Planning in Jira Align.

Work the Plan: Achieve Enterprise Agility With Jira Align

Posted on August 23, 2023 by - Agile & DevOps, Platform Adoption & Governance

In the previous articles in this three-part series, we discussed facing the challenges standing in the way of Enterprise Agility, and planning for Enterprise Agility based on value. In this article, we’ll dive into some of the ways Jira Align makes it possible for organizations to effectively execute, monitor, and adjust their plans to deliver value consistently.

The following content is taken from the webinar, “Enterprise Agility with Jira Align Part 3: Executing the Plan and Pivoting for Success”

How critical is visibility at all levels of the organization?

As an entrepreneur or executive, having a clear understanding of the value your organization delivers, why, and how, is vital to long-term success. If you can’t see what’s being accomplished at all levels of the organization, you’re flying blind when it comes to creating a strategic vision. And that means you won’t necessarily know when pivots are needed or when you’d be well served to double down on a given pursuit. 

At the same time, team members with “boots on the ground” benefit greatly from having visibility into even the highest-level strategy guiding the organization. Studies have shown that a clear understanding of the high-level goals the company is striving to achieve helps improve overall employee performance, engagement, and morale. It shows them where their efforts fit into the larger picture. And when decisions are made to pivot, they understand the reasons, making it easier and more likely for them to support the change.

Why is Jira Align the perfect tool to provide this visibility?

Jira Align is a software solution from Atlassian custom-built to support organizations looking to scale their Agile practices enterprise-wide. For companies who are already using Atlassian Jira or Azure DevOps, Jira Align provides a highly customizable platform that syncs data with these systems to provide top-down and bottom-up visibility across the entire organization. 

To see if your organization is currently at an Agile maturity level to benefit from Jira Align, read our white paper, “The 5 Phases of Enterprise Agility.”

Pivot or persevere decisions

Jira Align helps leaders with “pivot or persevere” decision-making. It offers the confidence to understand how the organization is delivering value now so that the inevitable drop in productivity can be calculated and planned for when a pivot is needed. 

A large organization pivoting is like a huge ship at sea negotiating a turn. It takes a long time and a lot of energy. The further the “admiral” is from the bridge, the harder it is for them to effectively direct that movement. Jira Align puts the admiral right on the bridge with fingertip access to everything they need to make and manage that pivot effectively.

For the remainder of this article, we’ll break down how Jira Align achieves this level of enterprise-wide visibility.

Executive level visibility

Jira Align provides space for executives to define and flesh out the top-level strategy for the organization and the company’s mission, vision, and values. Once it’s recorded in the system, this strategic foundation is visible to everyone. And, each aspect of the strategy can be directly tied to broad strategic themes, which are then deposed into portfolio epics, program epics, features, and eventually stories and tasks. That way, even the smallest task at the team level can be tied directly to a broad strategic goal the enterprise is working toward.

Some examples of Jira Align modules that provide this visibility include:

  • Strategic Backlog: Create and manage broad strategic themes that outline what the company will be focusing on for the coming one to three years. These themes include sufficient detail to ensure alignment with the company’s mission, vision, and values. And, space is provided to develop the high-level OKRs that will support evaluation of the theme as feedback data comes in.
  • Work Tree: Break down strategic themes into the various epics and connected units of work to evaluate how they are progressing in relation to OKRs. Is value being delivered? And, is it sufficient to justify spend, or are adjustments warranted?
  • OKR Tree: OKRs are the “eyes and ears” leaders will use to determine the impact they are making on the market. To decide if their existing strategic themes are paying off. 
  • Strategy Room: This is one unified space where data from all the above sources and more are brought together to provide a highly-visual representation of high-level strategy and the real-time progress being made toward achieving strategic goals. This is where tuned-in executive leadership will most often live inside Jira Align.

Explore a deeper dive into the enterprise-level reporting available through Jira Align.

Portfolio level visibility

With strategic themes developed and prioritized, they can be broken down into various portfolios of work. From there, portfolio managers will create and manage epics designed to meet OKRs that indicate the company is achieving its strategic goals. Those epics will be further broken down into backlogs of epics to be pursued at the program level by established teams of teams. Because of the visibility provided by Jira Align, even two levels down, 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: Quickly and visually capture the strategies the portfolio is pursuing. All the items from the strategic themes are displayed with their portfolio and program epics to see how everything is connected.
  • Portfolio Epic Lifecycle: This screen offers program managers visibility into portfolio epic details, including: estimate, WSJF/priority, features, and objectives. This can be powerful when used in PI planning and monitoring.
  • Program Backlog: When features enter the backlog, program managers can further rank and refine them for delivery during the PI. The backlog allows for drag-and-drop or right-click ranking, estimating, and WSJF analysis. It’s directly connected to the portfolio epics, so all those details are also visible to portfolio managers.

Click here for more details on portfolio-level reporting available in Jira Align.

Program level visibility

As noted above, program managers are afforded visibility up into the portfolio epics and higher-level strategic themes, goals, and OKRs. Similarly, teams and portfolio managers can zero in on epics and features at the program level to monitor work in real time and use that information for decision-making across the board. 

A couple of powerful modules program managers and others find very useful include:

  • Feature Record: This module breaks each feature down with rich details including a description, target sprint and scheduling milestones, estimate, what product it’s related to, total stories, risks, dependencies, objectives, and acceptance criteria. This information can be incredibly valuable for story writing, among other things.
  • Program Room: This is another unified and highly visual means of breaking down and managing work throughout a PI in real-time. From portfolio epics down to individual stories and tasks, all the work in past, present, and future PIs can be displayed here.

Check out a more detailed treatment of program-level reporting inside Jira Align.

Team level visibility

The data sync between Jira Align and Jira or Azure DevOps is where all this comes together. It allows all of the data generated in both systems to cross-populate so that teams working in Jira or AD have constant visibility into work created or prioritized in Jira Align. This is made possible via the WHY button that appears at the top of each ticket. 

Additionally, managers and product owners working in Jira Align have constant visibility into the progress of producing against all strategic themes, portfolio epics, program epics, features, and related OKRs.

Learn more about team-level reporting you can exploit with Jira Align.

If your organization is actively pursuing Enterprise Agility, we strongly recommend exploring Jira Align. It’s a powerful tool that can help you effectively work your plan and produce value as intended.

What is the difference between Atlassian Jira and Jira Service Management?

Posted on April 25, 2023 by - Platform Adoption & Governance

When it comes to managing complex initiatives, businesses can often benefit from selecting the right collaborative software.

Atlassian’s Jira and Jira Service Management (JSM) are powerful tools that provide exceptional project management solutions. Jira is the more traditional option, focusing strongly on issue tracking and agile project management. Jira Service Management builds on this foundation by offering a range of added features specifically designed for IT and service teams, including incident management, problem management, and change management.

With both options offering robust customization capabilities and integrations with a wide range of other software, it can be tough to choose between them. So which one is right for your business? Let’s inspect the key differences between Jira and JSM to help you make an informed decision.

The Key Features of Atlassian Jira Software

Atlassian Jira is a powerful project management tool used by thousands of organizations worldwide. With its user-friendly interface and robust features, Jira makes it easy to track and manage complex projects.

One of the key features of Jira is its flexibility—users can create customized workflows to fit their specific needs. Another standout feature is its extensive reporting options, which allow users to generate a variety of reports on project progress, team performance, and more. Collaboration is also a key aspect of Jira, with built-in tools for team communication and task assignment. Jira Software provides functions for supporting the two principal ways people do “Agile” development—essentially they give you Scrum and Kanban boards (and the supporting structures behind them). Jira Software is licensed based on total users.

This powerful project management tool offers a range of benefits that can help your business stay on top of tasks and projects. With features like real-time collaboration, task assignment and tracking, and customizable workflows, Jira streamlines communication and enables teams to work more efficiently. Plus, the platform integrates with a range of other tools including Confluence and Slack, making it easy to keep all your work in one place.

How JSM Can Streamline Your Service Desk Solutions

Jira Service Management, on the other hand, is designed to provide IT service management (ITSM) and Enterprise Service Management (ESM) solutions by offering an easy-to-use self-service portal, request management, SLAs, queues, and incident management. Jira Service Management is licensed based on total agents (users able to edit/work on requests). Customers (users submitting requests) can access the product for free and do not need a license.

As businesses continue to evolve, their customer support and service desk solutions require advanced tools to meet increasing customer expectations. JSM helps businesses of all sizes streamline their service desk solutions, improving the efficiency of their support teams, and delivering a better customer experience.

Atlassian Jira Service Management offers an intuitive user interface, making it easy for users to navigate and manage service requests efficiently. This platform also allows automation of recurring tasks, reducing response times, and freeing up the service desk team’s time for other high-priority tasks.

JSM also offers multiple scalability options, including customizable workflows, powerful templates, and automation rules. These features make it easier for businesses to stay competitive, regardless of their size and scope.

The solution also integrates with other Atlassian products, such as Jira Software and Confluence, and with a host of third-party apps. These integrations enable businesses to collaborate seamlessly to resolve service issues, creating a perfect workflow for more efficient decision-making.

Also, it offers a wide range of self-help features, including a central knowledge base and the ability to create and publish articles to solve user problems, which increases customer satisfaction levels.

Which of these solutions is right for you?

Of course, only you can answer that based on your unique business needs. Many organizations find that using both Jira and JSM optimizes different aspects of their business. In other cases, one or the other could fill a gap where an existing solution falls short; utilizing available app integrations or creating custom integrations can then marry the two solutions.

If you’d like help evaluating these powerful Atlassian applications, rely on the Atlassian experts at Cprime to help.

Cprime and Asana: Building a Bridge of Agility Using Work Management Software

Posted on March 29, 2023 by - Platform Adoption & Governance

Talent shortages, budget constraints, and a constantly changing market highlight the need for agility across the board, starting with a collapse of siloed technology. And what’s the result if companies do this at scale? Greater predictability and quality, faster time to market, and the flexibility to pivot as things inevitably change.

We’re thrilled to announce that we’ve entered into a partnership with Asana, a top disruptive player in the competitive work management space.

Read the full press release here.

Combining Asana’s powerful software with Cprime’s expertise and guidance offers customers unparalleled visibility and insight into all the work, all the time. But, that’s not all.

For almost 20 years, Cprime has been a trusted strategic advisor to organizations undertaking Agile and digital transformation. Our coaching, training, and tooling expertise puts us in a unique position to help clients fully leverage Asana’s solution.

Asana helps teams execute 42% faster with easy-to-use features to organize, track, and manage work. The solution helps combat the silos that make teamwork more painful and enables organizations to bring work together in one shared space to stay organized and connected. The goal is to unify work around a single source of truth, save time and effort through efficiencies, and foster seamless collaboration through integration and automation.

Cprime’s and Asana’s dynamic solutions converge to solve for Enterprise Agility, enterprise technology, and learning challenges, big or small. The alignment of teams and tech stacks around business outcomes is central to that mission.

Together, Cprime and Asana are working to usher work management into the Agile world, to organize and build an environment that fosters collaboration and agility across all teams, and to build a bridge between business and technical teams to support Enterprise Agility.

With this new partnership, those lofty goals can become an easy-to-attain reality for every organization. If you’d like to explore adopting, migrating to, or optimizing Asana as your work management tool of choice, contact our experts today.

Optimizing Atlassian Cloud Implementations — Part 2: Processes And Retraining

Posted on March 9, 2023 by - Enterprise Architecture, Platform Adoption & Governance

Make the Most Out of Your Atlassian Cloud Investment

The first part of this series reviewed the importance of customizing your Atlassian Cloud tools and workflows to suit your organization’s needs. Customizing your Atlassian Cloud implementation supports collaboration, increases efficiency, and offers insights into your performance.

While Atlassian Cloud’s product suite is highly customizable, getting the most from your migration to Atlassian Cloud may require you to adjust your existing processes. These changes can necessitate training to bring your employees up to speed on using Atlassian Cloud tools and familiarize them with new workflows.

In this second part of our series, you’ll learn when and why your organization should adjust workflows and processes after migrating to Atlassian Cloud. Then, you’ll explore the importance of effective employee training in making the most of your Atlassian Cloud implementation.

Optimizing Atlassian Cloud Processes

To be successful in today’s business landscape, you need to be agile and efficient. One way to achieve this is by adopting modern, cloud-based tools like Atlassian Cloud. However, simply adopting the tool isn’t enough. You must fine-tune your processes and workflows to fully incorporate Atlassian Cloud capabilities.

Optimizing your workflows and customizing your Atlassian Cloud tooling boosts your overall productivity, makes software development seamless, and helps you maintain a competitive edge, and help support compliance while meeting business needs.

When Should You Adjust Processes and Workflows to Optimize Atlassian Cloud Functionality?

While adjusting your processes to accommodate Atlassian Cloud may feel daunting, the benefits of doing so are substantial. The following sections will help you better understand when and why these adjustments are necessary and what advantages they bring.

Your Legacy Tooling Is Causing Inefficiencies

Legacy tools may lack customization, can be prone to security breaches, and often prove difficult to maintain. Incorporating Atlassian Cloud tools can help you ease these bottlenecks.

As the first part of this series outlined, Atlassian Cloud tools are accessible and flexible, making it effortless to perform customizations and introduce integrations to fit your teams’ needs. Integrating with third-party applications also allows developers to create seamless workflows that reduce data silos.

Atlassian Cloud also helps maintain the security and compliance of your infrastructure. Because Atlassian Cloud has such thorough security protocols and standards, it adds another layer of protection to your environments, ensuring industry-standard security and compliance and reducing data breaches.

Incorporating Atlassian Cloud-supported tools and adapting your processes to make the most of them can be invaluable for unlocking the additional value in your Atlassian Cloud investment. The more Atlassian Cloud tools you use, the more streamlined those workflows become. For instance, your teams can use Jira Software to manage projects, Confluence to collaborate, and Bitbucket to manage source code. Since these tools are all supported by Atlassian Cloud, you can centralize your operations and eliminate inefficiencies.

You Want to Increase Efficiency Using Automation

Performing repetitive tasks manually is laborious and cumbersome. Besides being wildly inefficient, it’s not beneficial to employee morale. Assigning someone to perform these duties under-uses and undervalues their expertise. If your pre-migration processes relied on performing tasks manually, you’ll want to adjust those processes once you’ve moved to Atlassian Cloud.

Atlassian Cloud tools like Jira Software allow you to automate tasks like status updates, notifications, and issue assignments. This automation frees your teams to focus on more important tasks, reducing manual work and increasing efficiency. And by designing workflows that are built to use Jira Software, you’re guaranteeing your Atlassian Cloud implementation will be efficient by design.

You Want to Improve Agile Processes and Implement Planning Tools

Agile is a crucial part of modern software development. It’s not just an ideal approach that businesses should implement when building software—it’s a requirement for businesses who want to create flexible, high-performing applications at scale.

The benefits of adopting Agile processes and planning tools are substantial, and they’re enhanced further with your Atlassian Cloud investment.

First, Agile processes provide greater flexibility and adaptability in project management, allowing teams to respond quickly to changing requirements and customer feedback. This approach emphasizes teamwork, collaboration, and continuous improvement, fostering a more engaged and motivated workforce.

Agile methodologies also result in a faster time to market, as teams work in short sprints with clear deliverables and milestones, allowing for more efficient project delivery.

Jira Software supports agile development through its collaboration and planning capabilities. This tool offers features like kanban boards, allowing teams to organize their work visually. Teams can also use Jira Software’s scrum capabilities to manage backlogs, sprints, and user stories, making planning and prioritization easier.

By developing agile processes and applying them to cloud-based planning tools like Jira, teams can work more efficiently and collaboratively, improving productivity and delivery times.

The Hidden Costs of Siloed Communication

Another reason to update your organization’s processes is to improve inter-team communication and reduce siloing. If silos bind your pre-migration workflows, you’ll actively need to fight siloing leading up to and following your Atlassian Cloud migration.

Siloing is high-risk: it can lead to less than 50 percent business outcome predictability because of unclear roles and a lack of inter-team communication and collaboration. So, if your organization suffers from silos, it’s time to revamp your processes.

Atlassian Cloud Confluence is a collaboration tool you can customize to fit your organization’s needs. Creating processes that integrate tools like Confluence ensures your workflows fight siloing and improve communication. It allows teams to create, share, and collaborate on documents so that everyone agrees. Confluence integrates with other Atlassian Cloud tools, like Jira Software, to ensure that teams work together seamlessly.

You Want to Optimize ITSM Processes

IT service management (ITSM) plays an important role in maintaining overall efficiency and repeatable workflows. With effective ITSM processes, you can facilitate seamless and consistent IT asset management, change management, incident management, and more. If your ITSM processes and tooling are outdated or ineffectively implemented, your customer impact will be low.

Atlassian Cloud offers several tools you can customize to fit your organization’s ITSM needs, including Jira Service Management (JSM) and Opsgenie. These tools allow teams to manage incidents, service requests, and changes in a centralized manner, reducing complexity and streamlining processes.

Optimizing Processes with the Help of an Atlassian Solution Partner

Atlassian Solution Partners, like Cprime, can help you identify workflows and processes that can benefit from updating to best leverage Atlassian Cloud capabilities. We can perform a consulting role, analyzing existing workflows and creating strategies to help you make the most of Atlassian Cloud tools.

First, we help your organization identify areas that could benefit from updates to improve efficiency, collaboration, and communication. These may include processes that are currently handled manually, using outdated technology, or not integrating well with other systems. We can assess these processes and help you implement Atlassian Cloud tools to streamline and automate.

Next, we develop a strategy to customize the tools to your organization’s needs, set up integrations between different Atlassian Cloud tools, and create optimal workflows. Cprime experts will help you leverage your Atlassian Cloud tools to generate more streamlined, efficient processes and workflows.

The Importance of Retraining: How Partners Like Cprime Can Help

Solution Partners can also provide ongoing support and training to ensure your organization uses Atlassian Cloud tools to their full potential.

After migrating to the Cloud or introducing new Atlassian Cloud tools, retraining is a best practice to ensure employees can use the new tools efficiently and effectively. This can help to maximize the benefits of the new tools and mitigate any potential risks associated with misusing them.

Solution Partners can help you retrain your team on using the new Atlassian Cloud tools, share best practices for collaboration, and show you how to customize the tools to meet your organization’s changing needs. This can be especially important for organizations unfamiliar with agile methodologies, DevOps practices, or ITSM frameworks, common use cases for Atlassian Cloud tools.

In addition, we provide ongoing support and guidance to ensure that your employees can use the tools effectively. This includes answering questions your team has, helping you troubleshoot issues, and helping you implement best practices. By providing this support, we ensure your employees can use the Atlassian Cloud tools effectively and to their fullest potential.

Conclusion

Adapting processes to suit your newly adopted Atlassian Cloud tools benefits your organization by increasing efficiency, improving collaboration, and facilitating better communication.

Redefining processes and retraining employees can be challenging to do alone, especially right after migration. An Atlassian Solution Partner like Cprime can make this process redefinition easier. We’ll help you identify areas of improvement, develop tooling implementation strategies, and provide ongoing support and guidance to your employees.

Read this case study to learn how a camera tech pioneer leveraged Cprime expertise for their large-scale Atlassian Cloud migration and optimization.

Customizing Atlassian Cloud Implementations — Part 1: Tools and Workflows

Posted on March 9, 2023 by - Enterprise Architecture, Platform Adoption & Governance

Whether you’re implementing automation, collaboration across teams, or shortened release cycles, Atlassian Cloud offers a broad suite of integrated tools to help you meet your goals. Atlassian Cloud’s flexibility enables your organization to pick Cloud-backed tools suited to your specific workflows, including DevOps and Agile workflows, IT service management (ITSM), and work management.

Besides being able to pick from tools like Jira Software, Confluence, and Trello, you can customize each one to meet specific teams’ and users’ needs. As a matter of fact, this flexibility allows you to tailor your Atlassian Cloud implementation to get the most out of your investment.

In this blog, which is the first part of a two-part series, we’ll explore the importance of customizing your Atlassian Cloud tools and workflows to suit your organization’s unique needs and the role that Atlassian Solution Partners like Cprime play in fine-tuning your organization’s Cloud implementation.

Customizing Atlassian Cloud Tools

The two key attributes of Atlassian Cloud tools that always need customization are functionality and appearance, which affect how a team uses the tool.

One example is Jira Software, a project management tool that ensures that software development teams and business teams alike can create plans, track progress, release, report, and automate various projects. 

Customizing your Jira Software features and appearance is crucial for tailoring the tool to fit your team’s workflows. For example, it helps streamline your processes, improve collaboration, increase productivity, and create a more intuitive and enjoyable user experience. 

The following are some of Jira Software’s functional customizations:

  • Create, edit, and configure Jira workflows to reflect a project’s specific process and requirements, including customizing statuses, transitions, and notifications. 
  • Create additional custom fields to capture additional data. Data could include customer details, priority, or any other custom fields that make sense for your project.
  • Implement add-ons and other integrations to extend Jira Software’s capabilities. For example, you can add agile planning tools, time-tracking tools, or other integrations that help your team be more efficient.

Jira Software also offers some customization to its appearance:

  • You can customize which Jira Software fields are visible on various screens so that unnecessary elements don’t distract from what’s more important, significantly increasing team productivity. 
  • You can also build custom Dashboards, offering tailored views of reports, task lists, and more, so stakeholders can access the right information at the right time.
  • Custom color options can reinforce your organization’s brand identity by promoting a consistent and professional look across your tools and applications.

As this quick overview of Jira Software shows, Atlassian’s Cloud tools are flexible and designed to support customizations that meet your needs. Consequently, when implemented correctly, these customizations benefit your workflows’ efficiency and impact. 

Customizing Atlassian Cloud for Your Workflow

Cloud_Migration_Medium_black_coralAtlassian Cloud provides several tools that you can use for various use cases. The following explores how you can customize Atlassian Cloud tools to suit your DevOps, ITSM, and Agile workflows.

DevOps

DevOps is a software development method that helps organizations enhance collaboration, communication, and agility across software development and operations teams. Further, this strategy helps automate the build, deployment, and release of software applications, increasing the efficiency of the software development lifecycle. 

Using tools that encourage efficiency and collaboration is key to DevOps processes. However, while many DevOps tools saturate the market, few support the customizations that could drastically improve your DevOps implementation.

Atlassian Cloud supports this customizability, allowing teams working in different stages of software development to complete their specific tasks more efficiently. Let’s explore some of Atlassian Cloud’s DevOps-supporting tools and how you can customize them to optimize your workflows.

Bitbucket is an Atlassian Cloud tool that benefits DevOps processes. Teams can use Bitbucket for code collaboration and version control, which enables them to manage their source code, collaborate on code changes, and deploy code to production. It supports Git and Mercurial repositories and integrates with other Atlassian tools like Jira Software. 

Suppose one of your teams uses Bitbucket as their code repository, and they want to ensure that their code meets certain quality standards before merging it into the main branch. To streamline internal DevOps culture, team leaders can customize Bitbucket to run automated code quality checks on every pull request. You can achieve this by setting up a Bitbucket Pipeline that runs static code analysis tools and unit tests on the code changes in the pull request. If the checks pass, you can automatically merge code into the main branch and trigger the next phases of operations to start.

By customizing Bitbucket, teams can work more efficiently, creating a seamless DevOps workflow that allows you to get high-quality software released faster.

ITSM

ITSM is a collection of processes that help organizations manage and support IT services, including IT infrastructure, software, and applications. Above all, it covers many activities and processes under the management umbrella, including incident, problem, change, service request, asset, and configuration management. 

With the evolving functions around ITSM, IT teams find themselves restricted by the tools they use. This rigidity reduces the adaptability of organizational needs, collaboration, and value for faster delivery. Customizable Atlassian Cloud tools like Jira Service Management (JSM) to ease these bottlenecks.

JSM supports an effective ITSM strategy by helping you manage incidents and problem tickets. Teams can customize JSM to create a specific workflow for security incidents. The workflow comprises tasks like initial triage, investigation, resolution, and post-incident review. With this approach, the team can ensure they handle all security incidents in a consistent and standardized way.

Integrating JSM with other Atlassian tools can improve ITSM processes and increase business value by streamlining workflows and reducing manual effort. As a result, this leads to faster resolution times, better team communication, and improved customer satisfaction. 

Agile

Agile processes are a set of iterative and incremental software development methodologies that prioritize collaboration, flexibility, and customer satisfaction. Based on the agile manifesto, agile development involves delivering work in smaller increments. 

To implement Agile development successfully, teams need clear communication and designated spaces for collaboration. With Atlassian Cloud, you can access tooling that supports both. JSM, Jira Software, and Confluence are three Atlassian tools supporting Agile development. More than this, you can customize these tools to serve your agile processes and workflows better. 

For example, your software development teams can use Jira Software to help manage their projects. Within Jira Software, they can create custom kanban boards composed of columns that state the progress of different stages of projects within their workflow. They can also add custom fields to their Jira issues to track additional information important to their team’s process, such as lead time or cycle time.

The ability to customize Atlassian Cloud tools is crucial in delivering business value in Agile environments. Specifically, Agile methodologies are iterative and require flexibility and adaptability to changing requirements. Using Atlassian Cloud tools, which support agile practices like scrum and kanban, your team can work faster and more effectively, helping you deliver higher-quality products and services to your customers.

Tailoring Your Atlassian Cloud Tooling with Cprime

Taking the time to examine workflows and processes is an essential step in optimizing any Atlassian Cloud implementation. Team leaders should start by identifying their key goals and objectives. This can help them focus on the most critical aspects of their workflow and identify areas that need improvement. 

Analyzing the existing systems that use Atlassian Cloud is also crucial in identifying bottlenecks and inefficiencies that customizations can reduce. Teams should continuously monitor and evaluate their workflow and processes, ensuring they identify areas that require further improvement so they are always working at peak efficiency. 

Even though you can perform these analyses internally, tailoring your tools requires an ultra-in-depth knowledge of Atlassian Cloud and its product suite. Using an Atlassian Solution Partner like Cprime can provide valuable insights into how to customize Atlassian Cloud tools and workflows to maximize the tools’ capabilities. Since we are experts in all things Atlassian Cloud, we can assess your teams’ needs and identify opportunities for your workflows and tooling, ensuring customizations are effective and sustainable as you scale. 

As a Solution Partner, we also offer training and support, Agile coaching, and implementation to ensure optimal customization of Atlassian Cloud tools for both small businesses and large enterprises.

Leverage the expertise of Cprime to get the most out of your Atlassian Cloud implementations. For more information on how you can tailor your Atlassian Cloud tooling to meet your needs and benefit your workflows, get in touch with us and check out the second part of this series.

You Need Tools for Transformation–But That’s Not All

Posted on January 17, 2023 by - Organizational Change & Culture, Platform Adoption & Governance

I have something to admit: I was that coach. 

I told people I was a tool agnostic coach because I didn’t understand the value of leveraging the best workflow management tools. Luckily for me, I learned, and the results are cool. In this quick read, I’ll explain why tooling can be such a powerful force in your transformation, and discuss what to consider when deciding what technologies enable digital transformation for your organization.

The moment I learned something was missing

For decades, organizations in both the Manufacturing and Software industries have been working to transform to better ways of working. These transformations come in multiple forms:

  • Six Sigma / Lean
  • Agile ways of working
  • Business Agility
  • Push to a Product Organization
  • Digital Transformation
  • …and more 

I have spent much of my career successfully supporting organizations through this change—defining new ways of working, supporting new methods of communication and collaboration, and guiding people through change.

In recent years, how we look at these transformations have fundamentally changed.

  • Workers are tired of change. We need new behavior drivers to motivate the organization.
  • Organizations are sick of single solution frameworks and mindsets. They want change focused on outcomes.
  • The world has accepted that change is the new norm to stay ahead in the competitive market. If change is a competitive advantage, then we need to be mindful of what and why we change.
  • Leaders need data to make decisions. Due to the fast pace of change, more real time data is needed to support these decisions.
  • These days, transformations need to be more holistic, comprising Agile, Digital, and even AI.

Early in my career, I spoke to organizations about outcomes, but we never followed through to validate those outcomes. Looking back now, I see this approach resulted in half the benefit it should have. We did not validate those outcomes because we did not prioritize data and tooling as a competitive advantage during a transformation. Today, I’m convinced that implementing workflow management tooling as a part of your transformation is essential for success.

This being established, let’s dive into what this means and what you should consider when implementing a tooling strategy.

Start with why, define the approach, and validate the outcomes

Templates_Medium_black_coralAs a leader in organizational change, I often get calls that start by asking questions like

  • Can you turn us into a product-led organization?
  • Can you help us implement SAFe or Scrum at Scale?
  • Can you support our use of OKRs (Objectives and Key Results)? 

My answer… Yes, but why do you want to do this? Further, what pains are you facing and what outcomes are you hoping to achieve? Surprisingly, many organizations do not know the answers to these questions. And sometimes, when they cannot find the answer, they want to start over completely. But that won’t help.

They don’t know these answers because they do not have the data they need.

So, before we jump into a framework, let’s begin by

  • Creating a high-level process and data value stream to understand how things flow through the organization
  • Educating the organization’s executives and leaders on what is possible by establishing new ways of working
  • Establishing expected outcomes and key results for the organization
  • Setting the path with a roadmap for achieving those key results, not compliance with a framework
  • Setting a cadence to measure the key results so we can build in continuous  improvement

The key takeaway that fundamentally changed my approach to transformation is this: Organizations must establish the results they hope to achieve and enable change to reach those results, rather than deciding how they expect the organization to function and trying to force change into that frame.

Looking back, this seems so logical. We even thought and spoke about this years ago, but our efforts moved in another direction. I now believe that happened because the market did not have the flow-based tools we have today, and I would argue our modern tools still don’t offer the ideal state. 

So, which tool best enables this mindset?

The fact is, there is no perfect workflow management tool or framework. But the right tool can aid you in reaching your objectives. Here are some things I have found to be critical to understanding what tooling solution will best enable your transformation.

  1. Start by understanding the dashboards you need to validate the organizational results you’re after. Having the end in mind will allow the solution to remain focused on only building what the organization needs and filtering out unnecessary data. This will help you focus on the minimum feature set you need from your tooling solution.
  2. Establish systems and data that can serve as your single source of truth. There will be multiple tools and data being exchanged across the system. Ensure only the source of truth can be changed, and only by authorized users. This avoids people overriding the data intentionally or accidentally to tell a different story.
  3. Different users will want different tools based on what they do and how they do it. Do not assume that one tool can support OKRs, create and manage a product roadmap, manage user stories, and support your help desk. All those users have unique personas and will need unique features to do their work successfully. Pushing the output from those different tools to a single tool will support the organization’s source of truth.
  4. One tool will not magically solve your problems. Your organization is a large, complex, living thing. Multiple tools will need to come together to provide the insights needed. Establish an enterprise architecture for how tools will exchange data. Leveraging cloud-based tools and tool integration solutions will be essential to your enterprise solution.
  5. Do not forget about communication and collaboration. The tooling is not just about work management and flow-based systems. The users will need an integrated collaboration feature to support them, especially as they work more in a remote and hybrid mode.

In conclusion, don’t be that coach. Or, for that matter, that organization. Don’t ignore tooling as a vital piece of the transformation puzzle. And, at the same time, don’t focus on trying to find the perfect single tooling solution to solve all your problems. Instead, approach your transformation from the standpoint of objectives and results. And use the unique tool stack that best guides you to those results.