Jira Align is an Enterprise Agile Planning solution for scaling agile practices. Formerly known as AgileCraft, Jira Align is the first ever platform purposefully built for scaling Agile to the enterprise.
Jira Align helps software organizations transform the way they plan, deliver, measure, and learn across their development lifecycles. By linking strategy to execution in real time, software at scale is made simpler.
The ability to align around common goals, support a number of scaling frameworks, and navigate the complexity of large-scale technology initiatives resonates with many organizations. And with Jira Align, companies can create unparalleled excitement and interest in the Enterprise Agile space.
Jira Align and Enterprise Agility
Enterprise agility is the bridge that spans both technical delivery and business (planning) teams.
Spreading the mindset of shorter quicker cycles of delivery beyond the team level and to all the levels of a business is important for reaching a more agile state across the company. Scaling to more iterative planning will yield similar benefits to those seen at the technical team level and what can be referred to as business agility.
Some key benefits of Enterprise Agility include:
- More optimized and predictable delivery with fully aligned organizations across every level of scale.
- Deliver value rapidly by shortening delivery cycles, increasing operational efficiency, improving quality, and responding faster to changing market conditions.
- Better customer satisfaction by responding quickly to market changes and increasing time to market.
- Always stay aligned to the ‘why’ through a federated, unified platform spanning program, product, portfolio, and development team layers.
The challenge in becoming an Agile Enterprise is coordinating between multiple teams, multiple programs, and multiple products. Are the technical teams mapping up to strategy and business outcomes defined during planning? Are the business and tech teams in sync? How can the team connect that thread without manually aggregating data?
This is where Jira Align can help.
Jira Align connects business strategy to customer outcomes at the enterprise scale. It helps:
- Make work visible at the enterprise scale
- Gets all teams aligned (and keeps them aligned) across an enterprise
- Maximizes outcomes, driving value and accelerating digital strategy
Benefits of Jira Align
Today’s digital economy presents opportunities and threats at every turn. And to thrive in this dynamic environment requires agility throughout the organization.
Jira Align enables organizations to lead in the fast-moving digital world by connecting business and technology operations in real time. It brings together the teamwork happening across an organization into an all-encompassing view that connects strategy, work, and outcomes. And because large-scale technology initiatives are increasingly complex, this visibility, context, and alignment are essential.
In essence, Jira Aligns helps embrace change and make speed a competitive advantage.
With Jira Align, modern organizations can:
Accelerate Enterprise Agility
- Use value-driven backlogs
- See real-time roadmaps
- Reduce dependencies
- Formalize flow
- Measure everything
Align at the Enterprise level
- Make all work visible
- Understand execution data
- Collaborate across teams and get aligned
Drive business outcomes
- Deliver value faster
- Speed concept to cash
- Gain market share
- Foster innovation
- Increase revenue
- Improve customer sat
- Reduce costs
Improve business operations
- Drive better quality
- Increase productivity
- Improve throughput
- Boost efficiency
- Improve engagement
How Jira Align benefits organizational scaling
Jira Align provides more optimized and predictable delivery with fully aligned organizations across every level of scale. It bridges the gap between business and technical delivery, leading to nimbleness across the organization and innovation with agility. It also delivers value rapidly by shortening delivery cycles, increasing operational efficiency, improving quality, and responding faster to changing market conditions.
With Jira Align, organizations can improve customer satisfaction by responding quickly to market changes and shortening the time to market. It also ensures that the organization always stays focused on the ‘why’ through a federated, unified platform spanning program, product, portfolio, and development team layers.
Jira Align also has reporting and metrics capabilities that provide various roles with the various aggregated data visible to ensure that:
- Changes in scope can be tracked across teams
- Results are visible early on, resulting in more rapid feedback cycles
- Leading and lagging indicators can be quickly determined to inform go-no go decision
Jira Align provides a wide range of role-based metrics and dashboards. As an example, Jira Align offers a Program Room of the ART for Release Train Engineers and Program Managers, showing the progress of the Program Increment. Release Train Engineers can also see teams’ performance through a multi-tier burndown chart and keep track of dependencies during the PI using Dependency Maps.
As another example, for Business Owners, the Portfolio Room shows the performance of the Agile Release Trains, including financial performance and resource planning.
This is only a small sample of the metrics and reporting available in Jira Align. With the aggregation of data cross-enterprise, presented in a highly visual fashion, individuals can assess how teams are performing and make adjustments as necessary.
Jira Align and Transformation Teams
Jira Align’s built-in functionality helps increase the efficiency of transformations. It incorporates features to make scaling easier, such as lightweight customizable governance or the “WHY” button. It also helps break down the barriers between portfolio, product, and engineering to allow all areas of the enterprise to work better together, becoming more agile together.
Jira Align also provides support for all scaling agile methodologies to make it easier to align an organization’s agile development practices. The platform enables organizations to scale more efficiently, just like Jira Software allowed organizations to transition to Agile/Scrum more seamlessly.
Jira Align vs Portfolio for Jira
Jira Align is best for:
- Targeted at 1K + organizations
- Multiple Jira instances and potentially other team tools
- Visibility at the entire enterprise scale
Portfolio for Jira is best for:
- 4-20 teams
- Single tribe with a single goal or OKRs
- On a single instance of Jira
- It is about organic growth from Jira
Does Jira Align align with SAFe?
Jira Align is the only platform purposely built for Scaled Agile Framework (SAFeTM). Jira Align comes with full, native support for SAFe 4.5, including configurable settings for the main SAFe configurations: Essential SAFe, Portfolio SAFe, Large Solution SAFe and Full SAFe.
Since Jira Align supports multiple portfolios for the same instance, there is no need to purchase multiple instances to customize the SAFe configuration for less or more advanced portfolios.
Jira Align includes a number of additional benefits for SAFe implementation, including:
- Lean Budgets: Allocate Lean budgets to strategic themes in the Portfolio Room.
- Investment vs Actuals: Monitor your execution spend against the theme budgets.
- Solution Management: Actively manage backlogs of capabilities with Kanban and WSJF prioritization.
- Strategy Room, where you can define your hierarchical organizational strategy on the basis of the 9 SAFe principles.
- SAFe Checklists: Create checklists to help users follow workflow steps or actions, in sequence, or access specific Jira Align pages and training videos.
Apart from SAFe, Jira Align also supports a range of other leading frameworks including:
- Lean Startup
- DaD
- Spotify
- Value Engineering
- LeSS
- Scrum at Scale
- Custom/Hybrid
Industries that can benefit from Jira Align
Any organization that engages in software development, views its software development competency as a strategic aspect of its operation, and is interested in effectively scaling this competency can benefit from Jira Align.
Currently, Jira Align is successfully deployed across multiple verticals including:
- Energy
- Entertainment
- Financial Services
- Government
- Healthcare
- Manufacturing / Automotive
- Retail / ECommerce
- Technology / Telecom
- Transportation
Specialists Who Can Use Jira Align
Company executives
It is the responsibility of the company leader to ensure that the organization is driving the right enterprise value and staying in step with corporate strategy. Furnishing real-time, up-to-date views into where value is being delivered in the portfolio relative to expenditure is usually a challenge. They also have challenges in aggregating delivery data.
Managers spend a lot of time creating datasets or development teams building out data sets. Accountability of the individual programs (and their teams) for work they have committed to becomes a complicated, unclear burden.
However, with Jira Align, they can have data views into portfolios and where resources are being spent in real time. Reporting is specifically tailored to executive needs, so that information can be delivered up to the highest levels accurately, quickly, and regularly.
With metrics and scorecards that provide transparency into what the teams are actually working on, Jira Align will save a considerable amount of time and have it all in one solution.
Jira Align provides real-time visibility into:
- Portfolio Value to Spend
- Budget vs Estimate vs Actual
- Strategic Governance
- Resource Management
- Metrics and Scorecards
- Project Funding and Status
Portfolio managers
It is the job of portfolio managers to communicate the value of funding strategic initiatives to investors, analysts, and employees. However, they usually face challenges when it comes to demonstrating, with tangible evidence, that the work program teams are delivering maps back to strategic investment themes.
They often struggle with defining a plan for how more robust Agile/bi-modal process will improve in time. It can also be a challenge to maintain Lean Agile principles (i.e., reducing WIP, managing flow), while attempting to scale within the organization.
With Jira Align, Portfolio managers now have a real-time, top-to-bottom, connected roadmap that aggregates data in a meaningful and convincing way.
Jira Align provides Portfolio Managers with the real-time tools they need:
- Real-Time Connected Roadmaps
- Resource Allocation
- Work in Progress
- Investment vs Actuals
- Strategic and Financial Alignment
- SAFe Portfolio-Level Support
Release train engineers
Release Train Engineers help to ensure that programs within their organizations run smoothly. They also make sure that resources are optimally allocated to ensure on-time delivery, with a focus on train predictability and value delivery.
However, release Train Engineers often struggle to provide timely insights to assess the likelihood of meeting deadlines, in addition to managing dependencies and risks between multiple programs. Program managers must track and resolve program risks, impediments, and dependencies while keeping the organization informed.
With Jira Align, Release Train Engineers and Program Managers have access to a visual program dashboard, with forecasting, simulation, risk tracking reports, and more. They now have access to reports with exactly the right information, updated to the minute. Jira Align provides a visualization of program cross dependencies that help to mitigate risks.
It also allows for a comprehensive view of resource allocation across projects, and visibility into inefficiencies and gaps that can be quickly resolved.
Jira Align provides Release Train Engineers with:
- Program Board
- Forecasting and Simulation
- Program Tracking
- Aggregated Progress
- Multi-tiered Roadmaps
- Dependency Management
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