We recently co-hosted a webinar with Atlassian, Gain Real-Time Visibility & Better ROI Jira Align, based on our incredibly successful breakout session at Atlassian Team '24. Atlassian Senior Solution Engineer Brad Kramer joined Praecipio's Amanda Babb and Michiko Quinones to share how Jira Align can help organizations achieve real-time visibility into their teams' cost of work.
We had several great questions during the live Q&A, and we've gathered them here with additional insight from our subject matter experts.
Special Access to the recorded webinar: Gain Real-Time Visibility & Better ROI with Jira Align
Webinar Q&A
Can we work with other technologies besides what you've demonstrated today?
AMANDA BABB: Yes. Resounding yes. We’ve worked with many different systems. We’ve integrated Workday, SAP, Oracle, and Clarity, and we can even implement smaller ones within the Atlassian ecosystem. Typically, an add-on app will pull the data out of the Atlassian Stack so it can then be sent to other systems.
To be honest, the Tempo suite of products coming together is pretty darn good at giving you that directional correctness. Of course, you can also integrate things like QuickBooks for the SMB folks out there. So, overwhelmingly, yes, we’ve got lots of different ways to implement this. In this demonstration, we used Tempo to track capacity utilization (e.g., logged hours vs. estimated hours or budget) and personnel costs. However, you can absolutely use other systems like Clarity to do this.
Enterprise Insights and Atlassian Analytics can also include 3rd party data. Jira Align has open APIs that allow you to move data in or out of the product.
As for data visualization, someone asked in the chat if Domo would be supported in addition to PowerBI and Tableau – as long as your reporting tool can talk to a SQL database, you’re good to go.
How do we forecast when we have both Scrum and Kanban teams? Our Kanban teams don’t point to their work, and we’re using cycle time.
BRAD KRAMER: For forecasting, you just need a couple of data points: How many members are on the team? How many man weeks are available in a given quarter? You’ll use this as the forecasting baseline. Be sure to include a buffer to account for things like standups, retrospectives, holidays, time off, and so forth. You’ll also want a sort of top-level view of the team.
We handle Kanban teams in a somewhat similar way to sprinting teams. So, for each phase of a Kanban flow, you will represent that as a certain number of Story Points. So, maybe each phase is two or three Story Points. As items move from one phase to the next, we’re going to capture those Story Points and use them as a method to understand both historical velocity and the available capacity looking forward.
Could we adjust the team's availability to tie to Outlook and see what they have blocked off for meetings? That way, we’d see free time to work on the sprint goal, and velocity would be impacted by sick time or PTO in real time.
AMANDA BABB: Yes. There's an active beta for this functionality, and it even integrates with things like Figma. It can be extremely granular or give broad swaths, but it comes down to how your financial teams need to effectively report back to their auditors and regulators.
How do you get the organization to buy into the governance model?
BRAD KRAMER: Cash? Cookies? Just kidding. Each organization is going to be very different. We usually discuss the “four corners of a successful Jira Align adoption.” The first, and one of the most important, is executive sponsorship – unless things are coming down from the top. If that’s the case, as it travels down the organization, people will decide whether they want to do it or not (unless they’re mandated to do it). Everyone’s mandated to do something in a company to get paid. This is just something that the executive leadership sponsor needs to be aware of.
Second, you need to have a clear idea of what an MVP looks like. You’re not going to adopt all of Jira Align – nobody does that. That’s a recipe for disaster. You’re going to pick 3-5 key things that you’ll get some immediate value from using the solution, and then you’re going to work on those and turn everything else off.
Third, you need to identify a pilot group. And this shouldn’t necessarily be the toughest, most difficult, most complicated project that you have going on. Work with a set of teams and program groups who are okay with being a bit of a guinea pig. You’re going to be learning from their experience, and they’re going to help you understand how their work functions in the new system.
The last corner is working with a Solution Partner like Praecipio. We find that more often than not, it’s not just the adoption of the product but also the organizational change and other changes that may follow, perhaps within Jira Software and other things within the Atlassian Ecosystem, that determines how successful a Jira Align implementation is going to be. Our Solution Partners are well-prepared to help with all of that during and beyond the initial deployment.
Do we have to implement everything all at once, or can we do it in pieces?
MICHIKO QUINONES: No, absolutely not. Adoption of Jira Align is a journey through a maturity model. No one adopts all of Jira Align right from the start. Most organizations pick 3-5 key value points in Jira Align to adopt. As you mature with the product and your ways of working, you can turn on additional features and functionality.
AMANDA BABB: Let’s take the case study we shared as an example. The first phase was actually to get them divested from their parent company and into their Atlassian platform and get them to share information properly between Jira and Jira Align. They’d been working in their parent company’s systems forever, and when they divested, the first step was to get onto their own systems.
Throughout that process, we started seeing opportunities to do things like consolidate portfolios and implement value streams. Implementing value streams within the organization was a big change management undertaking.
The next step was using Jira Align integrated with their financial software to begin financial planning, tracking, and reporting by plugging their various systems into it. So, what we’ve demonstrated today is really phase three with this organization.
Even within that, there are so many little mini phases – we’ve got to get the Tempo implementation done right, we’ve got to be aligned on when we’re going to enable the connectors to let the data flow, accessing various data lakes and BI tools. So, if you’re only ready for just one piece, great! Let’s do that and then let it bake because you need data to do the next piece, and the next piece, and so on.
What’s the best approach for integrating Jira Align into a large organization? Would a phased approach be best, or launching all at once during something like a PI Planning Event?
MICHIKO QUINONES: I mean, we’ve seen multiple approaches that work. The size of your organization and the amount of support you have for a good change management plan seem to be the drivers for shaping these kinds of projects. It’s important to help people understand how things will change for them and their team. As Amanda said, it’s not hard. We could set up Jira Align for your whole organization in three days. But…it’s hard. You have to have people use that system. Answering questions like, “How is this going to be organized for our organization?” and “What is this going to look like for us? How do we want to set up our Jira Align?” is important during the initial planning process before you start implementing Jira Align and integrating it with your other systems.
I recommend starting with a pilot. Once you’ve decided how you think it should be deployed, get people in the system and get feedback from people using it that way. If you can take that little bit of time, you’ll get natural buy-in because people will start using it. That’s always so interesting to me – when people start to see their data, it changes everything in their minds. Often, they’ll look and say, “Oh, wait! Are we doing all of that stuff? I didn’t know we were doing all of that!” That alone changes how they want to set up Jira Align because now things are becoming visible that weren’t before.
Again, the first phase is to figure out what structure will work for your specific organization. Second, practice with that structure and get people to become champions as they do that. Help your change management group by giving them something to talk about with the rest of the organization. Then, I would advise phasing in the rest of the organization.
Do we need to be an enterprise-level organization to get the most benefit out of Jira Align?
AMANDA BABB: Not necessarily. One of our SMB clients got A LOT of value from simply connecting their Jira Software and Jira Service Management instances to Tableau to get better cross-domain reporting.
Most of our clients start small with one or two programs. They see an almost immediate benefit with cross-team reporting and dependencies made visible in Jira Align. By connecting larger items like Initiatives and Objectives, even if there are only a few, these clients get even more visibility across their entire organization.
Do you have to be an executive to benefit from Jira Align?
BRAD KRAMER: Everyone in the organization who is somehow connected to either strategy, planning, or execution will benefit. The sweet spot for Jira Align is the Portfolio level and Release Train level. Even Scrum Masters who have a foot in both the world of Jira and Jira Align will benefit from automated reporting and visibility into higher-level strategy. In contrast, people higher up in the organization are not only going to be able to see the strategy they’re planning, but they’ll be able to track execution.
So even if I’m a senior executive in an organization watching one of our strategic goals and we’re just not making enough progress, I can drill down and see what work is going on and what is still left to complete. So, it isn’t targeted towards one part of the organization. It’s both a top-down solution and a bottom-up solution.
What is Atlassian doing to better support 3rd party integrations with Atlassian Analytics?
BRAD KRAMER: That depends on what you mean by third-party integration. From a Jira Align perspective, we have open APIs that allow you to move data in or out to connect to other tools or solutions. Not all of our information is API-enabled, but much of it is.
Atlassian Analytics is not a typical integration with Jira Align. Depending on your organization’s use of APIs and other important factors like security and networking, you can do real-time APIs back and forth.
Atlassian Analytics and Enterprise Insights don’t integrate—they simply use third-party data as a source of information, either to connect with Enterprise Insights through a reporting solution like Tableau or to use Atlassian Analytics to connect to Enterprise Insights and other third-party solutions for other kinds of data. To use other data from tools like NetSuite or SAP, they just need access to it, whether that’s natively in the product, as a data mart, or as a data lake.
Would using Jira Epics as primary “containers” to organize stories that comprise a team’s work in Jira clash with Portfolio Epics in Jira Align?
MICHIKO QUINONES: If Jira Epic is the same as Feature, that’s perfect. In Jira Align, you will connect those Jira Epics to a higher-level Portfolio Epic. The integrations between JA and JSW are at the Jira Epic level and below.
The Portfolio Epics in Jira Align are meant to be at a much higher level than Jira Epics. Jira Epics are usually containers for stories, as you mentioned, or a parent to those stories. And stories take anywhere from a couple of days to two weeks at the most to complete. So you can think of a Jira Epic as taking a few months or less to complete.
A Portfolio Epic, on the other hand, is what we’d think of as a project or an Initiative at the company level. So you can have many Jira Epics that roll up to a Portfolio Epic in Jira Align. And in fact, that’s a very smooth integration. When you’re in Align, you’ll have a parent Portfolio Epic, and then underneath that, you’ll have Jira Epics or Features that seamlessly fall underneath that. Same with the stories. So if someone at the executive level wants to see that data in Jira Align, it does get translated up. At the same time, the ability to see what initiative you’re working on and what that’s all about, there’s something called the “Why” button that translates down, “Why are we doing this?” It goes all the way down to the story.
AMANDA BABB: One more thing related to the translation is that if you’re coming from something like Jira Plans, you can think of a Portfolio Epic as an Initiative. We’ve changed the name in some cases because we’re trying to stay away from certain taxonomies for organizations that aren’t as familiar with SAFe. A Portfolio Epic is just the next biggest thing or the next biggest thing above a Jira Epic.
Does Jira Align replace Jira Structure software?
AMANDA BABB: It can. But we've seen some organizations run both as part of a maturity journey. Those that are ready for Jira Align go into Jira Align, and those that aren't (or new teams) stay in Structure to mature enough to be brought into Jira Align.
We’re always cautious to ensure our Marketplace Partners understand and know that we support the right tool for the right job. With that being said, Jira Align can replace Jira Structure. However, we frequently see the two of them coexisting. We see the same thing with Plans. Companies will ask, “Does this replace Plans?” and in most cases, it depends on the maturity structure. We may have part of the organization that’s ready to go into Align, their portfolio is planned beautifully, they understand everything, now they just need a data structure or a platform to manage all of that – a.k.a. Jira Align, and that integrates with Jira Software.
And then, we may have a part of the organization that just launched – for example, maybe they’re part of the new Digital Customer Program, or maybe they’re just starting to get going, and they may need something smaller to help them just see, here’s our hierarchy, here’s how we’re organizing our work, here’s how we plan things, here’s our process. They may then mature enough within that to get into Jira Align eventually. We see these hybrid environments pretty frequently with Plans, Structure, BigPicture, or any number of other platforms. We’ve even seen tools outside of the Atlassian ecosystem come into this. When you’re ready to dig into this, we at Praecipio talk about this stuff all day long, so we’re happy to talk through it. We can help you determine the right technology to match your organization's maturity and future growth.
Does Jira Align have Executive Portfolio Roadmap Views, or is it best used on the RTE (Program) plus execution level or all levels?
MICHIKO QUINONES: I know several teams at the Program and RTE levels that are in love with this part of Jira Align. The Program Board and the Program Room are staples that people go to every day to give them a comprehensive view of everything from blockers to risks to higher-level strategy items all in one view—it’s very nice.
The roadmap is highly configurable, and it’s configurable at all levels. So, if you want to see a Theme roadmap or an Initiative roadmap or an Initiative roadmap with its children Jira Epics, you can see that. And finally, some very senior enterprise portfolio views enable you to parse that out by a specific strategy. So, say you have specific strategies that only apply to a certain number of Initiatives. You can see the finances, as Brad had mentioned earlier; you can see those different financial cuts come in. You can make those cuts by creating a filter called a strategic snapshot.
And lastly, I’ll mention the OKR Hub. The OKR Hub is probably best-in-class. It enables you to see work connected to strategy connected to key results. You saw some of that on our dashboard. It’s very slick and well-thought-out.
Can you explain the pricing model for Jira Align? Do you pay for only the people with access to it or everyone at the organization?
AMANDA BABB: Jira Align is licensed separately from the other Atlassian products. You can license just the folks you need to. There’s a minimum of 30 users, which can support up to 120 Team Members. Pricing and tiers are listed at the bottom of the page here: https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/align/pricing
Additional Questions? Contact our team, and we'll connect you with a subject matter expert who can answer any questions you have about achieving real-time visibility into your organization's cost of work!
