The Journey to Enterprise
Agility with Jira Align
Five customer success stories
Introduction
For an organisation to be successful in today’s high-speed economic environment, efficiency and streamlined performance are vital. Adopting an Agile methodology for software development purposes has long been a pathway toward faster, more customer-centric development.
As businesses continue to prioritise enterprise agility, the demand for tailored tools and processes has never been greater. While each organisation’s journey is unique, certain tools have become essential in this space—Jira Align being a standout example.
What is Jira Align?
Jira Align is Atlassian’s platform for enterprise agility. Built around the principles laid out in the popular Scaled Agile Framework (aka SAFe® or Agile at Scale), Jira Align was designed from the ground up to provide a single source of truth for all levels of the organisation across business units. It provides the structure and visibility needed to effectively plan, deliver, measure, and learn across the entire organisation.
The Key Benefits of Using Jira Align
By incorporating Jira Align effectively, an organisation embraces four key benefits of the platform that support enterprise agility:
- Alignment across the organisation: Enhanced visibility into the work makes meaningful collaboration possible across teams, departments, and levels.
- Streamlined workflows and standardisation: By speaking a common language — value-driven backlogs, real-time roadmaps, and top-down strategic guidance — everyone can effectively work toward the same goals and measure progress in a meaningful way.
- Improved business operations: This alignment and transparency supports better quality, increased productivity, improved throughput, greater engagement with team members and customers, and, perhaps most importantly, predictability.
- Driven by business outcomes: With the entire organisation aligned, no one is focused just on the what or how. Instead, everyone is focused on the why, and that drives all decisions. The results include faster speed to market, greater innovation, reduced costs, improved customer satisfaction, and increased revenue. Coupled with predictability, these are sustainable foundations for continuous improvement and successful growth.
Important Factors When Considering Jira Align
However, it is important to note that Jira Align is not a silver bullet that’s going to automatically shower these benefits on any organisation that implements it. Rather, essential considerations help define the “ideal candidates” for a successful Jira Align implementation. At a minimum, a company positioned to get the most from Jira Align.
Will already have achieved a significant level of agility. Jira Align is not the tool for organisations at the start of their Agile journey, just as a Formula One race car isn’t the right fit for a teenager with her learning permit.
Is of sufficient size and complexity. Smaller organisations — even those at a high level of Agile maturity — will likely be able to match most benefits of Jira Align at a lower cost using other tools, such as Jira with one or more plugins. Jira Align is most effective for development organisations of 10 or more Agile teams making up one or more Agile Release Trains (in SAFe® terms).
Is already familiar with/working toward Agile at Scale. Whether it’s pure SAFe®, another popular scaling framework, or some homegrown version, the organisation should already be far enough into its scaling journey that items like common boards, common project structures, bucket sprints or a unified delivery cadence are not going to upend productivity.
Beyond these minimums, the most crucial factor for long-term success with Jira Align is a commitment to continual improvement and a company-wide willingness to learn, grow, and change as the journey progresses.
Next, we’ll take a look at five companies we’ve worked with that have all adopted Jira Align and seen tremendous success. Each one was unique, and each started from a different point in their Agile and scaling journeys. Which is most similar to your company’s current situation?
The Five Most Common Entry Points for Jira Align Success:
Across all the Jira Align implementations we’ve overseen, the scenarios described in the following pages are the most common customer entry points that sparked highly successful outcomes. In all cases, these companies met or exceeded the minimum requirements discussed previously. So, with the impetus described, the time was right to explore Jira Align.
- Company A: is considering SAFe® (Agile at Scale) to scale Agile practices across the portfolio
- Company B: is operating at scale to optimise visibility across the enterprise, leading to bottlenecks
- Company C: is already considering Jira Align to improve visibility across teams and higher level strategic views
- Company D: is already involved in an Enterprise Jira Align rollout for a large number of users to increase visibility across the company
- Company E: is engaged in a Portfolio Jira Align rollout to provide visibility into dependencies and improve strategic decision making
If some of the company descriptions in the following examples resonate with you, this may be an excellent opportunity to talk to one of our experts at about implementing Jira Align for your organisation.
Company A: is considering SAFe® (Agile at Scale)
Companies have some Agile maturity at this entry point, and they want to scale Agile across the enterprise. To do so, they’re considering the different scaling frameworks to decide which would work best for their organisation. They recognise that technology is a component within that, and they need to make sure the tool they select will fully support whichever new scaling framework they choose.
Company Overview
This leading global financial technology company employs over 36,000 people and has been in business for well over a century. Starting in 2015, they underwent a wide-ranging digital transformation that included shifting from waterfall to Agile development practices.
Entry Point
They had been Agile at the team level for some time. Still, they saw the need to scale their Agile practice across their entire portfolio of products to support continuous innovation and extraordinary customer experiences. So they evaluated various frameworks against their unique circumstances and vision, landing on SAFe® as the best option.
They realised that the technology stack they were using for project and task management — a loose combination of Jira, Confluence, Smartsheets, and spreadsheets — was not up to the task of supporting a truly efficient Scaled Agile workflow. So, in 2017, they fully committed to Jira Align as their tool of choice to lead the way in their Scaled Agile journey.
Cprime Elabor8 Solution
As Platinum Solution Partners for Atlassian tools, our experts came in to handle training and support before, during, and after the full implementation of Jira Align and integration with Jira and Confluence. In addition, they optimised the data architecture to ensure everything feeding into and coming out of Jira Align was reliable. And, they put integrations in place to pull together Jira, Confluence, GitHub, and Jira Align to ensure all solutions could speak seamlessly.
Results
Now, Jira Align serves as a single source of truth that stakeholders at all levels can turn to for near-real-time reporting, strategic rollups of planned and active work, and benchmark budgeting estimates. As customer insights come in, product owners and managers create requirements for upcoming program increments, then break them down into epics and stories. These filter down into Jira, which the engineering teams still use for daily task control. Then, data from Jira moves back into Jira Align for ongoing reporting and feedback.
As a result of these improvements, the company has accelerated the delivery of new capabilities and fixes from every few months (using waterfall methods) to every day.
Company B: is operating at scale but lacks optimal visibility
Organisations at this entry point are already actively using SAFe® or a similar scaling framework, but they’re just not getting the visibility they need across the enterprise. They probably don’t have the right metrics, the proper reporting, the portfolio, or the strategies in place to see the full value of Agile at an enterprise scale. So, they’re looking for a tool that can offer that vital visibility.
Company Overview
Based in Sydney, Australia, this firm develops investigative analytics and intelligence software designed to wrangle vast amounts of unstructured data for applications like digital forensics, financial/cybercrime, and more.
Entry Point
After rapid growth and expansion — going from a team of two developers to over 400 employees in just a few years — they were practising Agile at Scale using the SAFe® framework. Still, they weren’t getting the level of visibility they needed across the board. In addition, bottlenecks were still arising due to some fundamental tool- and process-based challenges:
- No defined intake process
- Lacking annual strategic goals that mapped down to team-level work
- Relying on Confluence to support PI planning
- Few effective roadmapping capabilities in Jira/Portfolio for Jira
Cprime Elabor8 Solution
In this situation, Jira Align is the unequivocal best-in-class solution. Built around the Team of Teams (the Agile Release Train in SAFe® terminology) and the Program Increment (PI), Jira Align highlights the feature — not the story — as the value delivery object. Its entire focus is providing visibility from the highest strategic vision to the simplest subtask, so the whole organisation can achieve strategic alignment, boost quality, and remove bottlenecks.
Cprime Elabor8 experts assisted with the transition of data and work into Jira Align, creating a seamless two-way integration with Jira, so the day-to-day engineering work could continue essentially as it was. In addition, we provided training to establish a more effective PI planning process around the built-in planning functionality in Jira Align, and Cprime Elabor8 coaches helped formalise the intake process. Supplemental training also supported the rollout so that all stakeholders learned to access and get the most out of the newfound visibility provided by Jira Align.
Results
This improved visibility greatly enhanced the value of each PI planning session because it allowed everyone in the organisation access to work progress, dependencies, reporting, and metrics. As a result, productivity and quality both increased dramatically. And now, the organisation has the necessary foundation to take full advantage of strategic planning at the highest level.
Company C: is already considering Jira Align
The third entry point is a hybrid of the first two. These organisations are already aware of and considering Jira Align. They have a level of Agile maturity and are likely already working toward a scaling framework. They need visibility above the team level because teams cannot deliver what they commit to in a timely fashion, and there’s little or no visibility into dependencies or higher level strategic views.
Company Overview
This rapidly growing company helps hospitals maintain profit margins and optimise operations through advanced data analysis and problem-solving. Their proprietary clinical asset management platform and supporting services help medical centres optimise their workflows, supply chain, staffing, and more.
Entry Point
When this company reached out to us, they were more than two years into their Agile journey and were already moving toward SAFe®. They recognised what they wanted and needed to accomplish:
- Improve visibility across all teams
- Improve prioritisation of work
- Identify and manage bottlenecks
- Build trust between IT and other business units
- Reduce manual reporting
They were actively seeking out a tool that could help them accomplish these goals. They had been using Aha! and ServiceNow, but they settled on Jira Align as the best option for a few reasons:
- Jira Align is product-centric (as opposed to project-centric)
- The roadmapping features will allow them to better plan future PI’s
- The Features level (above the epic) was missing from their current tools
- The Jira Align ideation module impressed them
- Jira Align’s capacity planning and metrics were significantly more robust
Cprime Elabor8 Solution
In this situation, Jira Align was not the only new tool the client adopted. While Jira Align is most potent and beneficial in conjunction with Jira and Confluence, we don’t usually recommend adopting multiple solutions simultaneously. However, we worked with the client to make the process as smooth as possible.
Our data transition experts helped move the data into Jira and Jira Align, creating a two-way integration so the two systems could talk seamlessly going forward. In addition, we trained the teams to consolidate their PI planning process within Confluence and Jira Align, and us coaches helped streamline processes. This training and coaching allowed all areas to benefit from the more robust reporting capabilities in Jira Align.
Results
Since implementing Jira Align, this company has seen far greater visibility above the team level. They were having problems with delivery because the teams could not deliver what they committed to on time. But now, they have visibility into dependencies and higher-level strategic views providing the needed transparency to allow for reality-based planning, real-time adjustments in workflow, and a combined purpose that drives the work.
Company D: is already involved in an Enterprise Jira Align rollout
In this fourth entry point, companies have already purchased Jira Align and are looking for help getting the solution set up and rolled out efficiently to get the most benefit from it. In this case, training is paramount because change management is a big concern and a trained user base is a comfortable user base.
Company Overview
This client is a large publicly traded multi-line managed care enterprise that serves as a primary intermediary for both government-sponsored and privately insured health care programs. They are committed to digital transformation as a foundation for change and improvement in the healthcare sector.
Entry Point
The company was already at a high level of Agile maturity and used Agile at Scale for a few years. They were already deeply invested in the Atlassian ecosystem. We had helped them develop an elaborate combination of Jira and plug-in integrations to provide them with most of the visibility, strategic, and reporting capabilities they were looking for. But, when Atlassian acquired Agile Craft and launched Jira Align, they immediately recognised it as the single tool that did everything they needed.
Cprime Elabor8 Solution
Moving 2,000 of their nearly 10,000 Jira users into Jira Align was a big project that required a significant amount of coordination, training, and coaching before, during, and after the transition. Likewise, they needed to do a lot of data scrubbing and work with backlogs to get them ready for an efficient rollover, so we assisted with that work as well.
Results
The client is thrilled with the increased visibility Jira Align affords. Feedback has included comments like, “we can’t miscommunicate — everyone can see everything!” In addition, they have found that using Jira Align has helped them optimise and enforce their feature refinement process.
Company E: engaged in a Portfolio Jira Align rollout
The final scenario to consider is a portfolio rollout where Jira Align is already the tool of choice, and the companies at this entry point may even have undergone a full enterprise rollout as described in the previous scenario. Jira Align is in play at the highest levels of the enterprise, but it’s time to tie that common thread from the business strategy down through each portfolio and into the day-to-day work.
Company Overview
The client is a leading LMS company with one core product and a suite of complementary products, all of which they manage simultaneously through Jira. But, they were struggling to meet their deliverables, missed their dependencies, and didn’t have visibility into the knock-on effect of moving stories and Jira epics. No one has sufficient visibility because everything above the Jira epic level is in excel spreadsheets or other tools.
Entry Point
Like the last scenario, the organisation has a significant level of Agile maturity and is operating under an established scaling framework. However, at this point, the focus is on honing in on the product side and product roadmapping, taking all the information they now have access to and leveraging it to impact strategic decision-making and portfolio management.
Cprime Elabor8 Solution
In addition to expanding the Jira Align implementation to incorporate all portfolios, we focused on training and coaching to bring the entire organisation up to speed on SAFe®. This provided the necessary alignment so that everyone could benefit from the visibility Jira Align supplied. It also proved to be a much-needed empowerment tool for the development teams who now had a legitimate means of arguing the case against scope creep and arbitrary additions to a sprint’s workload.
Results
The change was incredible throughout just a few planning increments. Scrum masters reported both meeting and overdelivering on commitments for, in many cases, the first time. Product managers reported a newfound trust in the development teams because they delivered on what they had committed. So, work became more predictable and forecasts more reliable.
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Discover how Jira Align can empower your organisation to achieve seamless digital transformation and strategic alignment. Our team is ready to guide you every step of the way.