Pivot or Persevere? Why Real-Time Data Matters

This article was originally published by Atlassian.

Understanding the cost of work improves strategic decisions, resource allocation, and organizational agility. But the challenge is gaining better visibility into these costs.

The simple, scary questions

In every enterprise, bosses ask two simple questions about projects and initiatives: Is it on time? Is it on budget?

To respond to these questions, enterprise employees will often turn to disparate data manually and inefficiently tracked in an Excel spreadsheet.

This is a common experience observed by Amanda Babb, Principal Architect, and Michiko Quinones, Principal Consultant—both in Enterprise Agility at Praecipio, an Atlassian Platinum Solutions partner. Babb and Quinones spoke at Team ‘24 about how they help customers achieve tangible business outcomes through analyzing and surfacing to leaders the real-time cost of work with customized dashboards.

The problem: lack of visibility

Babb and Quinones shared an example of one company that was $10.5 million over budget on an initiative, but didn’t know about it until the end of the year. This lack of visibility hurt the organization’s ability to make informed, real-time strategic decisions on whether the initiative was still worth pursuing. 

The problem enterprises face isn’t a lack of data; they have plenty. “We have all of this stuff,” Babb said, which includes data about:

• Strategy — Includes data about progress toward OKRs, initiatives, and features.
• Delivery — Includes data from DevOps systems, quality metrics, and work data from Jira.
• Service — Includes data about IT support and data from Jira Service Management.
• Financials — Includes the organization’s extensive financial data.

Although many organizations make efforts to unify data from various sources, the challenge is making timely, data-driven decisions. “It is very important that we have near real-time data available to us from these disparate systems,” Babb said.

The solution: a single, unified dashboard

Praecipio offers a unified dashboard solution for clients, aggregating near real-time data from multiple systems in a single view. This dashboard presents clear insights into the execution and cost of each business objective. Business leaders can use this data to monitor project performance, assess initiatives, and make informed decisions about ongoing investments.

For example, shown below is Praecipio’s single pane of glass dashboard for a company with an objective of (top right) delivering a more compelling self-service experience. Execution data aggregated from multiple systems shows that this objective is 86% complete (middle left), based on work including epics, initiatives, and more.

Real-time budget data shows 101% utilized (bottom left), as spending slightly exceeded the budget based on executed work. Overall, 81% of the key results (middle right) have been achieved so far. The dashboard provides similar visibility for any objectives.

Executives deciding whether to continue investing in an objective can also view remaining work by feature, along with epic estimated spend and costs.

“It looks very simple. That’s what you want your executives to see . . . they don’t really need to see what’s happening underneath,” Quinones said. In Praecipio’s experience, the goal is to provide executives with a simple view they can use to make decisions–even if what’s happening behind the scenes is complex.

Shown below is an example of a tech stack for one of Praecipio’s clients. The tech stack on the left makes the executive visibility on the right possible. Of particular importance is Jira Align, which is a great platform for connecting with and aggregating data from multiple systems.

Three best practices to increase cost visibility

While every company, situation, and dashboard is different, Praecipio shared three best practices to help enterprises gain better cost visibility.

1. Turn strategy into data. This means translating high-level goals into quantifiable metrics. Once metrics are established it becomes possible to identify and gather the appropriate data—using platforms like Jira and Jira Align—to measure performance against these goals. 
2. Apply stringent data governance. To lean into governance, establish a shared portfolio, align everyone to a shared cadence, and govern objects by defining the timing, stakeholders, and intake process. To start, consider determining when work begins, specifying authorized project contributors and data handlers, and outlining steps for project execution.
3. Automate the data feeds. Once metrics and data governance are established, automate the dashboard feed, for example, by scheduling nightly refreshes.

By following these best practices, your enterprise cost dashboard will be a powerful resource to reliably track projects and make important business decisions. 

The benefits: Tangible business outcomes from maximizing the impact of data

When enterprises have real-time visibility into their business—including the execution of projects and the cost of work—they can realize multiple tangible business benefits. 

It’s hard for executives to effectively run a business and manage projects without near real-time visibility into the cost of work and performance against executional goals. At the same time, a state-of-the-art dashboard, like those developed for clients by Praecipio, can offer tangible business benefits and competitive advantages.

In our on-demand webinar, watch how Jira Align and Praecipio help enterprises gain real-time ROI visibility. 

Learn more about Praecipio’s enterprise visibility solutions.

This article was originally published by Atlassian.