There are currently very few people who understand Jira Align well enough to implement the enterprise platform well. In our last blog post on Jira Align, we discussed the different layers of Jira Align’s value proposition and how to maximize this enterprise platform to deliver value faster. Now, we’re breaking down what it takes to implement Jira Align and how to do it successfully. 

In every Jira Align implementation I have been a part of, I’ve found myself sharing the analogy that implementing Jira Align to its fullest in many ways is like building a Boeing 787, but making it look like a Cessna 172 to start. The secret is to begin learning to fly a Cessna 172 while having the vision of a 787 and picking up additional flight capabilities as your organization evolves. The same applies to a Jira Align implementation. Because the process involves so much change, you must learn to alter on the fly (no pun intended!). 

In other words, you are learning to fly the plane, becoming more competent and confident through training and coaching, then adding new flight capabilities, and repeating the process again until you reach your desired final configuration of capabilities. This is why Jira Align deployments are so challenging, but when done properly, the return is  340%+ ROI.

Determining Your Jira Align Readiness

Before you even carry out an implementation, you need to determine if your organization is ready for such a powerful platform. This first begins with understanding the intricacies of the platform. Many companies purchase Jira Align thinking it is a reporting tool, but it is so much more. Jira Align enables organizations to achieve true agile transformation by scaling Agile principles and connecting strategic vision to work execution. 

In addition to having a profound understanding of the platform and how it will support your organization, you will also need to determine your organization’s readiness. This checklist is a good place to start:

• Leadership Vision - In my almost 7 years of implementing Jira Align in firms ranging from 10s to 100s of teams, a leadership team with a clear vision for an agile transformation is the top indicator you’re ready. If you want to implement Jira Align and don’t think you are on the path of an agile transformation, then you aren’t ready.
• Executive Champion – An executive champion’s active leadership in a Jira Align implementation and the concurrent agile transformation will significantly improve the odds of success with both. An executive sponsor is not enough.
• Active Change Management – Adopting Jira Align requires significant change in organizational thinking and processes. Change on the scale of adopting Jira Align will result in significant discomfort. It both enables and forces change in process and mindset. “No pain. No gain.” The gain is worth it.
• Realistic Timeframe Expectations – An initial pilot at the program (team of teams) can be implemented within 3 months. A full implementation modeling the firm from Enterprise/Strategy to Team levels will take at least 9-12 months. Scaling out and coaching everyone on adopting and internalizing the related mindset, processes, and practices will take as long as a typical successful agile at scale transformation: 18- 36 months. The payoff is worth the investment.
• Training & Coaching Funding – Purchasing Jira Align is more than just a technical investment; it also means investing  in changing your company's mindset. The funding for training and coaching for both Agile-at-Scale/SAFe and Jira Align best practices should be on par with a transformation.

Next Up: Implementing Jira Align

If your organization is prepared to take the next steps in unlocking enterprise agility with Jira Align, we recommend working with an Atlassian Solution Partner to ensure your project’s success. When you have a partner to help with the heavy lifting, they bring years of experience and technical expertise. Additionally, they possess the know-how to resolve any challenges or issues that might occur.

When deciding on an Atlassian Solution Partner that is specialized Agile at Scale, here is what you need to successfully implement Atlassian’s dynamic enterprise platform:

• Tier 1 Consulting Skills – First and foremost, any qualified implementer must demonstrate an ability to elicit client needs. Each successful Jira Align implementation follows patterns but must meet the client’s specific needs. They also need to have the knowledge of the Jira Align patterns and anti-patterns. Not many can demonstrate this combination of skills and knowledge.
• Mindset Shift Coaching – Mindset coaching is one of the most critical skills needed by an implementation team because clients are undergoing a transformation while they simultaneously deploy Jira Align, whether they are aware of it or not. This starts with a team that can demonstrate a proven ability to help clients build a mental model of where they are to where they are moving from a uni-dimensional model in Jira and other team tools to Jira Align’s multi-dimensional model. 
• Technical Expertise - The Achilles heel of every Jira Align implementation is the Jira integration, which is why skilled Jira admins are critical (or ADO admins if using ADO) on both the client and implementer side. In addition, you need technical expertise to support the configuration and integration into your existing technical ecosystem. Implementers who don’t understand the integration often configure it improperly, resulting in syncing issues, improper data models, impacts to reporting, and more. This improper configuration leads to frustration with Jira Align. Praecipio has a proven, repeatable approach to implementing Jira Align from a foundational starting point and then building upon it with options that are tailored to the client's specific needs and make a tangible impact on value delivery.
• Configure First, Customize Later - Many organizations make the mistake of customizing the rest of their tool stack before they properly configure their Jira Align platform. Unfortunately,  when things aren’t working due to bad configuration decisions, the blame is put on Jira Align. Jira Align is highly configurable, but it is not customizable like Jira and other team tools. 
• Strategy Development & Modeling - Modeling strategy in Jira Align can be done multiple ways. Each client’s strategy approach is unique. One of the greatest challenges is that clients often don’t have a strategy that can be executed in a systematic way. There is no way to directly tie a specific goal to a specific set of funds and back to specific work efforts. Instead, there are many-to-many interconnections that end up causing confusion. Alternatively, the strategy may have been created in a single dimension view in slideware by a strategy firm that doesn’t understand the platform and tool stack the client has in place.
• Value Stream Modeling - Jira Align is designed to support value flow thinking and metrics vs. utilization-based thinking. Fundamentally, in alignment with SAFe, Jira Align is designed to support the model of work flowing through stable, long-term sets of teams-of-teams that deliver value to end customers. This is the fundamental difference between project management and agile development.  Whereas agile development is designed to bring work to the people (in stable teams), project management brings the people to the work, constantly breaking up and reforming short-term teams that can never perform.
• Financial Modeling – Jira Align’s financial capability is robust and can be implemented in several ways. Many companies will start with project-based budgeting where the portfolio epic is a proxy for a project. More mature Agile-at-Scale companies will use strategic themes and theme allocation to drive PI-based budgeting, which allows easier pivoting and other adjustments on a quarterly basis, if needed. 
• Product Development and Modeling - Enterprises are moving to or interested in moving to product-driven development. Jira Align has many features of a product-centric approach, including personas, product visions, product roadmaps, and product distinction. Product-driven development requires a different mindset and approach than most current forms of development which are currently in use.
• Business Process Optimization - We are modeling a complex enterprise into a value-delivery based platform. Many get it wrong by modeling the management organization in Jira Align vs the value delivery structure. Companies need the management hierarchy for stability, but the value delivery network is far more important for visualizing and delivering value. Servant leaders understand the difference and embrace the value delivery approach modeled in Jira Align . 
• Professional Experience – Book smarts and classroom training can’t replace years of professional experience with strategy and process engagements gained over multiple implementations. Jira Align requires an apprentice/journeyman approach when learning to implement successfully. The implementer needs to be a well-rounded unicorn with strategy, process, and technology experience. Jira Align is incredibly powerful and to unleash that power requires a level of understanding that comes from the combination of classroom theory and proper mentoring.

Final Thoughts & Next Steps

Every company deserves a proper Jira Align implementation, and if you follow the path laid out above, you have a less stressful, faster and more successful deployment. Also know that you don’t have to do it alone. There are Solution Partners within the Atlassian ecosystem that are specialized in Agile at Scale and Jira Align implementations.

We think you may also be interested in our whitepaper on Jira Align, "The Connected Enterprise: Close the Gap Between Business Strategy & Execution."

After supporting hundreds of enterprise clients in scaling their businesses, Praecipio is here to help. Book a technical call and we can discuss how you can tailor Jira Align to meet your organization’s specific needs and help achieve your strategic vision. 

Last year 80% of organizations had accelerated their digital transformation strategies due to the pandemic (Source: 2021 State of Service Management Report). In addition, the rise of the remote-working employee, in particular, has necessitated the need to replace manually-reliant ways of working with digital workflows that better suit the parameters of distanced working. 

IT Teams across the globe have had to advance their adoption of digital-first practices and processes to enable as much of the global workforce to work from home. As a result, many of those teams have implemented ITSM (IT Service Management) practices and are beginning to use a similar framework across their organization: enterprise service management. Learn the 6 benefits of implementing enterprise service management or ESM tool.

Enterprise service management uses IT service management (ITSM) principles and capabilities (including the ITSM tool) by other business functions to improve operations, service, experience, and outcomes – offers a ready-made solution for this corporate need for digital workflows.

You might also be interested in ITSM, ESM, or SM? What is Service Management and How Can It Help?

So, how do you implement a tool historically used by IT across a broad and diverse organization?

Selling Enterprise Service Management to the Wider Business

An important thing to appreciate when selling enterprise service management to the broader business is that the name will not resonate with the business functions looking for digital workflows and perhaps more overall digital transformation capabilities to solve their pandemic-related challenges. Another is that the IT personnel selling the value of enterprise service management to business colleagues need to “stay out of the weeds” – focusing on the outcomes rather than the minutia of ITSM.

Focus on the needs of the individual business function(s). If valuable, these can be matched to specific enterprise service management benefits – that sit under the umbrella of “better, faster, cheaper” – such as:

• Optimized operations through best-practice digital workflows and other digital enablement capabilities
• Improved employee and customer experience and satisfaction
• Greater speed of operations and outcome delivery
• Increased employee productivity – for both service requesters and service providers
• Reduced costs – at both an operational and business level
• Increased agility and scalability – especially with automation reducing the reliance on manual operations
• Better meeting governance, compliance, and legal or regulatory requirements; plus, improved risk mitigation
• Greater insight into operations, services, experience, and outcomes, plus improvement opportunities 
• Amplified workflow benefits through the use of AI-enabled capabilities

Each of these benefits should be described in business function examples and terms, mapping to the business function needs to be provided—for example, the ability for HR personnel to collaboratively work on employee onboarding tasks while geographically distanced. For example, this blog shows how a legal team benefits from implementing enterprise service management. The above is a long and involved benefits list; it might be best to start with a punchy “What’s in it for you,” which could be your “elevator pitch” for enterprise service management. Then, hopefully, you’ll know what’s best to promote in the context of your organization and its challenges – with perhaps the need to tweak it slightly for each business function based on your knowledge of their specific requirements.

If you would like to learn more about the benefits of enterprise service management and how to best sell it within IT and the broader business, then reach out, and let’s start talking.

There are many definitions and uses of the term Enterprise Service Management in our industry. It can be confusing but it's worth defining because Enterprise Service Management is a powerful framework you'll want to leverage extensively in your digital transformation. So, what is Enterprise Service Management or ESM?

Is it even called "Enterprise Service Management" now?

Let's start with the first word of this phrase, Enterprise. In 2021, Praecipio conducted a survey on the state of Service Management. One of the questions we asked attempted to get right to the heart of this particular debate:

Is it called "Enterprise Service Management"?

Source: Praecipio 2021 State of Service Management Survey.

Service Management originated within IT organizations (and is often referred to as IT Service Management, or ITSM). Enterprise Service Management then was often used to describe the application of Service Management's principles and practices for teams outside of IT.

Service Management in Practice

A good way to get a feel for Service Management is to look at some examples of how it can help various functions within an enterprise. We've seen customers use Service Management to level up across their organization with amazing results.

Whether the customers are internal or external, every organizational function is in the business of providing service. The facilities team provides well-maintained, functional physical spaces. The accounting team provides financial record-keeping and reporting. Human resources provide talent recruitment, employment policy, and wellness programs. The IT helpdesk and customer support teams are also classic examples, and the list goes on.

While all of these teams serve different purposes, they all deliver services to customers. In that light, they share the practices and capabilities of Service Management. Each team needs to manage these common attributes in order to deliver an exceptional service experience Some examples include:

• Request intake
• Resource workload
• Incidents (when things don't go quite as planned)
• Knowledge sharing
• Metrics and improvement
• Change

Each team often has a variety of use cases for some or all of the list above. Problems arise when each team or department is using its own customized program or solution. For example, when teams try to work collaboratively, having siloed tools creates friction and slows down processes.

This is what Service Management was designed to address.

Frameworks Guide Us

The most effective way to adopt Service Management is to work from a comprehensive framework, like ITIL 4. Looking at the highest levels of ITIL, the practices, we get a sense of how it can be used to define and improve service delivery.

The largest ITIL practice area, Service Management, is comprised of 17 practices, including Service Desk, Availability Management, Change Control, Incident Management, and Validation/Testing.

Managing your organization’s service delivery using these practices produces an upward spiral of improvement and capability. As consultants, this is where we spend most of our time, designing and configuring the Atlassian Service Management tools to enable these critical practices.

In Conclusion

While it's tempting to start with tools as a solution to service delivery challenges, you must first begin with the practice and treat the tool as a supporting component. This enables you to define critical policy and strategy decisions that align the entire organization instead of losing focus and having to constantly reinvent the wheel. Additionally, this mindset will set you up for success in preparing your teams for the ever-changing business landscape of our digital future.

To read more about Service Management, check out our blog on how Service Management is More Than an IT Service Desk. 

There's a big wide world of Service Management out there and it can be a little confusing to navigate! Let us be your guide! Get in touch and let's determine how Praecipio can best help you adopt and accelerate Service Management throughout your organization.

What's a data lake?

Read up on the basics in our explainer.

At Praecipio Consulting we understand that the data contained within your Atlassian tools is a critical asset for your organization. To help customers more easily access their Jira data, Atlassian has developed Data Lake! As of March 2021, Data Lake is available to preview in Jira Software Cloud Premium and Enterprise.

Warning! Beta software should not be used for production purposes. Breaking changes are likely as Atlassian tweaks this functionality based on user feedback. Not all Jira data is currently available and permission levels are limited but Atlassian is quickly working through its roadmap. In addition only English field names are available, as of now. Therefore, any information presented here is subject to change.

Data Lake allows you to quickly connect the best-in-class business intelligence (BI) tools you've already invested in to query the lake directly.

Compatible BI Tools include:

• Tableau
• PowerBI
• Qlik
• Tibco Spotfire
• SQL Workbench
• Mulesoft
• Databricks
• DbVisualizer

Data Lake uses the JDBC standard supported by many BI vendors. Supporting an open standard provides tremendous flexibility and power in reporting on your Jira projects.

Once you've identified the components of your BI solution, you'll follow three basic setup steps:

1. Configure the JDBC driver
2. Connect your BI tool(s)
3. Navigate the Jira data model

You'll need your org_id and an API token for your Jira Cloud instance. Except for creating an API token (if you haven't already), there's no config required within your Jira instance. There are instructions for connecting to various BI tools in the Atlassian community Data Lake Early Access group. In addition, you'll find posts and diagrams to assist in answering business questions using Jira's data model.

If you're a Premier or Enterprise customer and would like to access the Early Access Program for Data Lake, complete this form to request access. You can also post questions and feedback for the devs in this group.

Are you interested in unlocking the power of data stored in your Atlassian tools? We're a Platinum Atlassian partner with years of experience helping customers leverage their Atlassian investment for even more value, so get in touch!

If one system can do with relative ease what it used to take multiple systems to do, it makes sense to use that one system, right? Following up on our first blog post of this series, we continue to explore the benefits that ESM brings to an organization. 

Historically, the toughest part of this statement had been that one system could not do what multiple systems could, resulting in a need to keep those multiple systems in place. However, the software has advanced to the point where this is not the case anymore. As an example, Jira Software was originally developed for software development teams to track bugs and was not feasible for an HR or Legal team to use. Today, its flexible workflows, security controls, ease of visibility, and several other characteristics have allowed all teams within the organization to use Jira. This has given way to the rise of Enterprise Service Management (ESM) as teams realize that they can simplify their software landscape and reduce the number of systems in play.

Consider three specific benefits of replacing multiple systems with one:

1. Eliminate clunky handoffs. The toughest part of the process is to understand and improve the handoff from one system to another. In addition to evolving teams, the work itself tends to change physical form, from an Excel spreadsheet to a Jira issue to a Salesforce ticket and so on. This creates unnecessary steps in the process and requires extra time to convert and understand the work. This behavior is not the result of intelligent design, but rather a factor of history and the way things evolved. Condensing to one system helps eliminate these physical shifts, resulting in cleaner handoffs and reduced process time.
2. Include a rich history. When an item moves from one system to another, its history can get lost. A classic example is when a developer has a work item without the original business requirements or design thoughts from upstream teams. Cutting down to one system provides the team with the ability to receive the entire history of the work item. This rich history provides valuable context, eliminates confusion, reduces process time by decreasing the time spent understanding the problem, and decreases the possibility of rework due to misunderstood context. 
3. Reduce Costs. One license paid to one vendor generates economies of scale and minimizes costs related to using multiple licenses. It typically increases bargaining power with the vendor and decreases cost per seat. Additionally, maintenance and training cost both decrease. If an employee works in one system, compared to several, that translates to only one training session versus multiple sessions. Better yet, keeping the training budget the same and committing to several training sessions on one system will further increase people’s proficiency in that system, boosting their productivity and performance. Maintenance then becomes easier as the IT team only has one system to monitor and keep running. Similar to training, when you invest time into only one system, it encourages deeper learning within the team and drives results in better support of the system, further minimizing costs due to less downtime and incident recovery time.  

Not to mention, using one system as opposed to several brings additional benefits of improved communication and data insights. Understanding the workflow and developing patterns is much easier in one system than it is when work transfers through several systems. Furthermore, when teammates only have one system to check instead of several, they are more likely to communicate faster and better understand problems. 

Finally, a benefit not to overlook is the fact that employees like working within a single system. In our experience, employees enjoy seeing workflow through to different teams and appreciate the ease of using a single, connected, and integrated system. Furthermore, with one system to monitor, teammates have improved visibility of work coming up the pipeline and can follow the progression of the work they’ve completed. This leads to a better understanding of upcoming work, as well as a greater sense of accomplishment when they can see their work completed. 

In the next of this series on the topic, we will explore the ROI of ESM based on our experience with a client, demonstrating how implementing ESM best practices can save you money while improving your processes.  

Michael Porter, a former Harvard professor, is one of the founding fathers of business strategy. He lent credence to the field by developing several ideas, frameworks, and theories around strategy that have been utilized, debated, and taught for four decades now. You may be familiar with his 5 Forces model, which is used to analyze the competitive landscape of a given industry, or his course titled “Competition and Strategy”, a requirement for all first-year Harvard MBAs. Though his ideas and theories are certainly not perfect and have evolved over the years, they laid the groundwork for modern businesses to think about their strategy, their position in the market, and their ability to move forward.

And when you think about it, it’s weird that some consider Enterprise Service Management to be a new business process management trend. Let me explain. 

In 1985, Porter co-authored an article with Victor E. Millar in the Harvard Business Review titled “How Information Gives You Competitive Advantage”. In it, he laid out a central argument that said with the explosion of computer usage, companies would have access to a ton of information, flowing freely through the organization, that would allow managers to make more informed decisions faster. This, Porter argued, would fundamentally change how business was done and provide new ways for companies to stay ahead of their competitors. 

Consider this excerpt from Porter’s article:

“The value a company creates is measured by the amount that buyers are willing to pay for a product or service. A business is profitable if the value it creates exceeds the cost of performing the value activities. To gain competitive advantage over its rivals, a company must either perform these activities at a lower cost or perform them in a way that leads to differentiation and a premium price (more value).”

In other words, to gain an advantage over competitors, companies must perform their value activities at a lower cost or in a way that adds more value. Porter foresaw the drastic increase of information that would be available to businesses with the shepherding of the digital era. He logically concluded that such information, if used and communicated correctly, could be advantageous to managers looking to make decisions around the value-added activities in which their business engages.

The prediction of a sharp increase in the amount of information has certainly come true. In the era of big data, companies gather, store, process, and use more data than ever before. The problem is that typically this information is siloed, only about one particular subject, or only accessible and understandable to a few highly-skilled workers. This is the problem that enterprise service management will solve to bring Porter’s 35-year-old vision to fruition once and for all.

Enterprise Service Management (ESM) holds that the (mostly digital) processes that have been championed and used to gain efficiencies by IT teams for so long apply to the business as a whole, as seen by the adoption of similar processes and technologies in departments like HR, Facilities, and Procurement. ESM suggests that an organization should have a tool, which typically takes the form of a piece of software, that allows information to flow easily, quickly, and freely through the organization (sound familiar?). At Praecipio Consulting we have grown fond of referring to this as an operating system for business - one central piece of software that is used nearly ubiquitously in the organization, one that allows work to flow from division to division, team to team, teammate to teammate, with no loss of information and an attached, rich history.

Consider the typical lifecycle of the development of a new offering by a business - whether that be a software feature, physical product, or a new service offering. Marketing will research the market and determine where gains can be made. They will pass intel along to Product, which will develop these insights into a new product idea. The Product team will work with Development to create requirements, Dev will build it, QA will test it, and then it will be released to the market. Along the way, Marketing will generate buzz, Sales will sell, Legal will validate legality, HR will manage employees working on the offering, so on and so forth. In short - it takes a village, a coordinated effort among teams from different parts of the organization to deliver the new offering to market. 

The logic of a single system which transmits work in this lifecycle with no loss of info and rich history is apparent, as is the cost savings garnered from a single license paid to a single vendor, maintenance and training for one system instead of several, and usage of an efficient process unmarred by clunky handoffs to other systems.

To achieve this business process nirvana, we have long advocated for the usage of Atlassian’s Jira, Jira Service Management, and Confluence products. Similar to Apple, Atlassian set out to develop products that work together seamlessly, but unlike Apple, Atlassian has retained that characteristic and further developed it to the point that these three products work together in harmony. The malleable and flexible nature of these products has helped them evolve from those used exclusively by software development teams for bug tracking to those used by IT, HR, Legal, Marketing, Customer Service, and several other business units. The ability of these products to merge these disparate units within a business shows an exciting step forward and potentially a culmination in Porter’s vision of a connected and integrated business.

In the next articles that will form part of this ESM blog series, we will further explore the logic and numbers behind enterprise service management, and why and how it can help your company. 

No matter the size of your organization or your industry, the end game of any company is to deliver the highest quality product to customers at the greatest market value, with the lowest cost of production. This school of thought drives the Agile methodology of software development, pushing for faster delivery of better products with the least amount of risk, and has fueled the scalable Agile solution for enterprise-level organizations: Scaled Agile Framework (or SAFe). Operating under the principles of Agile development, SAFe aligns the development and initiatives of all levels of the enterprise company- from agile teams to executives- for accelerated value delivery at a reduced risk. Leveraging short feedback cycles organized into sprints and release trains, the cost of deployment decreases as deliverables have clearer direction and requirements to ensure a better fit for purpose. 

How does Atlassian support SAFe?

What are the core values of SAFe?

How does Atlassian support SAFe?

The Atlassian product suite was created (and is continually innovated) to support best practices in the Software Development Lifecycle. To that end, the use of products like Jira Agile, Confluence and Jira Portfolio integrate to bring maximum traceability to every release, enabling teams to hit their deadline and their budget with the highest quality product. With Atlassian, you unlock the power of SAFe, leveraging Jira Agile, Confluence and Jira Portfolio to achieve the following objectives (and much more): 

Want to learn more about SAFe?

Ready to learn more about how Scaled Agile brings best practices and delivers the greatest results to your enterprise organization? As Atlassian Platinum Solution Partners, Praecipio Consulting is here to help! 

First, check out our webinar on SAFe®, Agile in the Enterprise, presented by Senior Solutions Architect, Certified Scrum Master, and SAFe® Program Consultant Amanda Babb to get a more complete introduction to implementing Agile practices at the enterprise level.

Next, contact us today to see how our Consulting Services can help you meet your goals.