Harness the Potential of Jira Align to Achieve Enterprise Agility

Though Jira remains a widely used project, program, and portfolio management tool, more and more organizations are moving to Jira Align as their agile development processes scale.

Do you know what makes Jira Align different from Jira?

Here’s your answer:

While Jira is ideal for small/medium scale businesses with up to 1k members, Jira Align is for large enterprises with complex requirements and a team of more than 1K members working across different teams.

In this crisp read, we’ll understand more about what is Jira Align, its powers, and how it backs your digital transformation efforts.

What is Jira Align?

Jira Align (formerly known as AgileCraft) is a cloud-based Enterprise Agile Planning platform that provides the right level of visibility to your team into their product roadmaps, portfolio plans, dependencies, and much more.

It unifies data together so that you can get real-time, robust reporting across your organization.

Furthermore, with Jira Align, you can generate reports (over 150 by default) in real-time with custom information that is specific to each role within the organization.

Who Should Leverage Jira Align?

For any enterprise organization that aims to blaze ahead on its growth trajectory, staying agile is business-critical. And that’s where Jira Align helps. You might want to consider Jira Align if your enterprise faces any of these challenges:

• Prioritization of work across products and teams
• Misalignment of business and technical teams
• Lack of visibility
• Collaboration takes place in Excel, Email, and PowerPoint

To understand better if Jira Align is the right fit for you, think along the lines of:

• Are you already well-established with Jira?
• Are you investing heavily in scaling your agile practice?
• Do you wish to practice lean portfolio management?
• Do you wish to utilize agile financial management principles?

If most or all of those statements ring true for your organization, then Jira Align is your key to true business agility.

What Makes Jira Align ‘THE’ Perfect Fit for Enterprises?

Jira Align is designed to provide visibility, alignment, and productivity for organizations that need to stay agile. Here’s how it makes it happen:

1. Real-Time Decision-Making

With Jira Align’s analytics, you can obtain real-time information at the program, portfolio, and enterprise level. It will provide decision-makers with insight into how well the organization achieves its holistic strategic goals, such as adhering to business objectives and delivering on them.

Also, Jira Align’s time tracking module enables organizations to manage projects, track work hours and holidays, control billing and costs, get real-time reports, and much more.

2. Dependency Management

Today, software development is a tall order. Dependencies across multiple teams, roles, or external vendors often create a risk of delay in delivering value and affect your team’s efficiency.

Jira Align can help you to manage dependencies as work items. Each team will send its dependencies to the other with the requested date (date, sprint, or project) and metadata.

You can own and accept work items, suggest new due dates, include links to features, capabilities, and epics, comment on the item, etc. Additionally, to create a more comprehensive work process, you can configure custom fields on dependencies.

You can control which fields are required and which fields should appear in slide-out panels. Admins may configure default and custom fields in the Details Panels Settings.

3. Strategic Planning

Strategic planning involves understanding operational priorities, establishing clear objectives for desired outcomes, and formulating a plan to achieve those results. But when an enterprise aims to manage tasks at scale, they need an efficient strategic planning tool that would allow them to take control of its vision and achieve its goals.

That’s when they should count on Jira Align.

Jira Align’s agile planning capabilities enable and align strategic planning, analysis, forecasting, and execution across programs, and teams by optimizing workforce capacity. It makes it easier to manage tasks with backlogs and Kanban boards, plan effectively with roadmaps, and ensure transparency at each phase of a project lifecycle. With real-time access to project data, you can gain a better understanding of the project’s progress, so you can plan other tasks and assign the necessary workforce.

4. Comprehensive Reporting

As Peter Drucker once said, “Only what gets measured, gets managed.”

That’s why to manage projects with finesse, you need to closely monitor all your efforts to ensure that project commitments are met, unplanned work is not added, and risks and impediments are communicated.

Jira Align addresses this by providing a Program Dashboard that has forecasting, simulation, and risk tracking reports. With it, you can get a comprehensive overview of resource allocation across projects, identify any gaps and inefficiencies, and how to quickly fix them.

5. Minimize Costs

When it comes to digital transformation, there are both visible and hidden costs. Visible costs are payroll and licensing fees that all businesses track and report on. The key reason for hidden costs is miscalculations about the total cost, along with poor management of production volumes compared to those reported.

Jira Align can help enterprises minimize both visible and hidden costs, which are incurred in the process of creating and delivering a project.

It is not just a smart business tool, but it’s also a smart financial tool.

You can utilize it to reduce costs around reporting. How, you ask? Since it is packed with robust reporting capabilities, you can get visibility at every level of an organization, which means you need fewer tools to make data-driven decisions, thus, resulting in fewer licensing expenses.

Furthermore, it can improve efficiency and accuracy by reducing the number of hours spent on manually pulling data and creating reports across multiple platforms, and organizations.

The Bottom Line

The best companies compete and thrive by implementing innovative and modern solutions in order to react to market changes and opportunities. Achieving enterprise agility requires seamless data flow, beginning with strategy and goals set by leadership and continuously proceeding through execution to deliver value. Achieving this is a challenging journey, however.

Through Jira Align, organizations can connect and align around common goals and objectives, and provide meaningful views and metrics for all stakeholders involved in the technology product lifecycle.

Want To Know More About How Jira Align Can Be Your Ally To Achieve Digital Transformation? Talk to Us !