As an organization grows, it becomes increasingly difficult to manage complex projects and align the work of different teams. Not to mention, enterprise organizations must figure out how to adapt to a fast-moving market while also finding ways to optimize resources. Then there’s the challenge of ensuring that your teams execute the work needed to carry out your company’s strategic vision.
Like with most strategies, they look good on paper until it’s time actually to implement them. For decades, organizations have struggled to translate strategy into tangible business results. In fact, 90% of organizations fail to deliver on strategy.
Failure to carry out a strategic plan leads to wasted time, money, and resources, all of which no company can spare these days. In today’s disruptive environment, businesses can’t afford to blindly assign resources to projects without having a way to track how that work contributes towards organizational goals.
Jira Align’s Value Proposition
One solution to bridging the gap between strategy and execution is Jira Align, a powerful platform that provides a way to increase visibility, coordination, and adaptability across an organization’s people, processes, and technology.
When configured correctly and in a way that meets the company's specific needs, Jira Align enables leaders to make data-driven decisions that optimize resource allocation. With greater visibility into how work is connected to strategic initiatives, teams understand why their work matters, and leaders have greater context into how teams and their workflows are tied to organizational performance.
Additionally, Jira Align allows organizations to scale agile practices and principles beyond the team level. This means that even as priorities shift and new challenges arise, Jira Align ensures that all teams are still working towards the same goals.
To explore more about how Jira Align connects teams with strategy, read our whitepaper The Connected Enterprise: Close the Gap Between Strategy and Execution, which is rich in valuable data. It also explores a model case study that demonstrates how an organization benefits from investing in Jira Align.
Why Jira Align Is Worth The Investment
Beyond the technology investment, Jira Align also involves a significant investment of time, resources, training, and coaching. After all, Jira Align is a transformation platform, which naturally involves change, but if an organization is willing to work through these growing pains, the end result is totally worth it.
Just look at Forrester Consulting’s Total Economic Impact Report on Jira Align. According to the study, Jira Align has helped customers achieve up to 340% ROI. The platform’s ability to break down silos and foster collaboration generates efficiencies, improves agility, and enables faster value delivery.
In addition to benefits like improved collaboration and employee experience, Forrester’s study also found that time-to-market was cut by 50% for the most complex projects and project managers, product managers, and program managers (PMs) realized overall time savings of up to 70%.
Even though these statistics clearly show that Jira Align is worth the investment, getting buy-in from senior leadership can still be a challenge. To convince your company to invest in Jira Align, you must demonstrate the value and return on investment that the platform brings specifically to your organization, which is hard to measure.
You also want to make sure you understand the layers of the platform’s value proposition and how these different components work collectively together to help your organization achieve its desired business outcomes.
It’s also important to note that Jira Align is no silver bullet and is not for every organization. Even if Jira Align fits your needs, your company still needs to be prepared for this agile transformation platform. This article will help you determine if your organization is ready for Jira Align and how to prepare your organization to successfully implement the platform.
How to Gain Stakeholder Buy-In
When it comes to technology, anything worth investing in is worth spending the time to gain leadership buy-in. After all, Jira Align is expensive and must be configured properly for it to work. It also requires significant time and resources as we’ve mentioned, and all of this adds up to make Jira Align a hard sell.
Before pitching Jira Align to your company, make sure you have a clear understanding of what your organization could accomplish by investing in Jira Align. You will also want to identify the specific pain points your business is experiencing and explain how Jira Align addresses those challenges.
Preparing an executive slide deck for your leadership team will help build your case and paint a clear picture of what Jira Align could do for your company. Having a deck enables you to concisely tell your story and also provides a space to share data points that support your proposal.
Preparing Your Executive Slide Deck
When you build your executive slide deck, start by presenting the problem that Jira Align helps solve, which in this case is connecting strategy to technical execution. Make sure to include an in-depth analysis of this pain point so that your leadership team understands that your organization isn’t an exception to this common issue.
After sharing why so many business struggles with delivering on strategy, offer up Jira Alilgn as your solution. You also want to share how Jira Align compares to other Atlassian tools as well as other agile-at-scale platforms on the market.
Demonstrating why Jira Align would be a good investment for your organization will be the most important card you play when trying to get your company’s stakeholders on board with Jira Align, and this isn’t an easy task. There is plenty of rich data that shows why Jira Align is a great investment, but how do you calculate the ROI specific to your organization?
How Praecipio Can Help
At Praecipio, we’ve seen it all when it comes to Jira Align implementations. Our agile experts know the ins and outs of Jira Align and how to make this powerful platform work for your organization.
We’ve put together this executive slide deck template with our friends at Atlassian to get you started with convincing your company to invest in Jira Align. It’s rich in data, tells a compelling story about Jira Align, and most importantly, has a space for you to determine your own organization’s ROI if it were to invest in the agile transformation platform.
If you want to do even more research on Jira Align, here are some helpful resources:
-
This on-demand webinar showcases how to use Jira Align to connect work execution to organizational strategy
-
This article walks you through how to successfully implement Jira Align
-
Co-authored with our friends at Atlassian, this whitepaper explores how to leverage Jira Align to improve visibility, coordination, and adaptation across your agile organization.
-
Get a great overview of what Jira Align is, how the platform works, and how it stacks up to other agile-at-scale platforms on the market in this article.
As an Atlassian Specialized Partner in Agile at Scale, our experienced agile practitioners have successfully helped hundreds of organizations accelerate the path to enterprise agility with Jira Align. Book a technical call and we can discuss how you to make Jira Align work for your organization.
