A couple of years ago, in Atlassian's annual flagship event formerly known as Summit and now known as Team, I was training a room full of people on Advanced Roadmaps for Jira. If you've never attended one of these in-person events, the Kickoff Keynote is always a sight to see. 

One year, Atlassian founders Scott Farquhar and Mike Cannon-Brookes dressed as Daft Punk and mixed music as DJ Kanban (I still nerd out on that one). They then proceeded to share announcements about new products, including the addition of Jira Align to the Atlassian product suite. I was floored because, at that time, Praecipio had been looking for a more powerful agile-at-scale solution like Jira Align for some of our largest clients. 

What is Jira Align?

After implementing Advanced Roadmaps for Jira (then known as Portfolio for Jira) to support SAFe® and becoming the "voice” of the tool within the Atlassian community, I was in love with Advanced Roadmaps. And I still am. 

Jira Align, however, brought forth a whole new realm of possibilities. Jira Align is a powerful platform that can help to close the gap between strategy and execution by providing a way to increase visibility, coordination, and adaptability across an organization’s people, process, and technology. 

Bringing robust framework expertise and combining it with an easy-to-use interface, Jira Align supports any agile-at-scale framework — from a Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe® ) to a Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS) framework to any custom or hybrid framework. 

Essentially, Jira Align is THE solution for enterprise organizations looking to scale agile practices. Don't believe me? Atlassian is considered a Leader in the Gartner Enterprise Agile Planning Tools Magic Quadrant. Third-party accolades aside, let's take a closer look at how Jira Align works.

How Does Jira Align Work?

Many of our enterprise customers come to us looking to become more agile so they can thrive in today’s fast-moving business landscape. Jira Align empowers business leaders to make data-driven decisions and enables the organization to quickly adapt. 

Atlassian’s dynamic enterprise tool aggregates work being done across all levels of the enterprise, making it easier for teams to manage and communicate work (i.e. programs, portfolios, themes, strategies) to stakeholders. Leaders also understand how work tracks against strategic outcomes in real time, allowing them to make better decisions regarding resource spending and financial investments. 

While Jira Align is indeed a powerful enterprise agile platform, it’s not for every company. It’s no silver bullet and your organization must be ready to embrace change if you want to see true agile transformation with the platform.

Similar to the financial commitment you made to Jira Align, you need to be as equally committed to training your people and properly configuring the platform to support your processes.

What Are The Benefits of Using Jira Align?

Jira Align is truly the ultimate enterprise tool. When configured correctly, Jira Align brings information and teams closer together and provides timely business intelligence that empowers business leaders to make smarter financial decisions. And the proof is in the pudding: Jira Align has helped organizations achieve up to 340% ROI. 

Whether you're just starting out with a single Agile Release Train (ART) or are running multiple ARTs, Jira Align provides the Program Room for each ART. This is the central hub for tracking the current Program Increment (PI) and planning the next one. Sprint Progress, investment runway, intra-ART and inter-ART dependencies, PI Burndown, it's all centralized within the Program Room. This provides Business Owners, RTEs, and Program Managers a clear view of the progress of the work in the PI.

Jira Align also provides the Portfolio Room and Strategy Room. These rooms display the progress towards Strategic Themes, Portfolio investments, progress toward long-term goals, and real-time status updates. When properly connected to Epics in the Program Room, Teams and ARTs can open the "Why?" tab on the Epic and see how their work is contributing to the overall strategy. 

This is where the magic lies in Jira Align. With greater visibility into how work is connected to strategic initiatives, teams understand why their work matters, and leaders have greater context into how workflows, teams, and projects are tied to organizational performance. 

Jira Software Integration

How you set up Jira Align to integrate with Jira Software at the beginning of your Jira Align implementation will determine your future success with the platform. Jira Software and Jira Align are designed to integrate bi-directionally, which means that data can flow back and forth between the tools.

If you have a straightforward Jira instance and follow Atlassian best practices, then the integration with Jira Software is pretty simple. However, after working with enterprise clients over the years–especially those with thousands of users–their Jira instance is anything but straightforward. 

You need technical expertise to support the configuration and integration into your existing ecosystem. Implementers who don’t understand the integration often configure it improperly, resulting in syncing issues, improper data models, and inaccurate reporting, just to name a few.

Jira Align vs. Advanced Roadmaps for Jira

There are a handful of tools within the Atlassian ecosystem for project/product portfolio management like Structure and Big Picture, but the most common agile-at-scale product comparison we get asked about is Jira Align vs. Advanced Roadmaps for Jira. 

Advanced Roadmaps is a great way to bridge the gap for small-to-medium-sized organizations with fewer than 500 agile team members executing their work in Jira Software. You can plan based on capacity, track dependencies, manage competing priorities, and explore alternative scenarios with a single source of truth into the current and future health of your initiatives. 

Jira Align, on the other hand, is capable of supporting hundreds to thousands of users at multiple levels within an organization. With Jira Align, leadership can get a quick, real-time snapshot into the work across every level of the organization, from individuals on teams up to the portfolio and executive levels of your organization. More than just a planning tool, Jira Align is a transformation platform.

Jira Align vs. Other Software Platforms

When it comes to comparing Jira Align with other alternatives on the market, Jira Align is in a league of its own. I’ve seen customers show interest in lower-cost alternatives, such as Planview, Tasktop, Aha!, and Hive, but these platforms don’t match up to Jira Align.

For starters, because these tools are outside of the Atlassian tech stack, they don’t integrate well with Jira Software. Also, some of the alternatives to Jira Align aren’t even agile tools, or they are agile but they only support specific agile frameworks.

Now, let’s say you do find an alternative agile tool that supports the framework(s) your teams run on, but you find that it lacks flexibility or it doesn’t comply with security standards. Or it turns out that the tool’s complicated interface has led to a poor user experience for your team members.

With Jira Align, you get it all: seamless integration with Jira Software, endless reporting options, meets the highest security standards, and more. Bottom line, when implemented properly, no platform on the market supports enterprise agile planning like Jira Align does.

How To Get Started With Jira Align

You’ve probably noticed a common theme with this article:

a successful Jira Align implementation is anchored in proper configuration.

It’s important to work with a partner who has extensive experience with Jira Align and understands both the platform's nuances and agile-at-scale best practices.

Specializing in agile-at-scale with Jira Align, Praecipio is here to help set you up for success with our proven approach. Book a technical call to discuss how we can tailor Jira Align to meet your organization’s specific needs.

Want to know more about bridging the gap between leadership and delivery? Download our whitepaper on Jira Align, "The Connected Enterprise: Close the Gap Between Business Strategy & Execution.” You can also watch this on-demand webinar about connecting business strategy to work execution with Jira Align. 

In her recent webinar, Proving Value: How Business Leaders Use Jira Align to Connect Strategy and Execution, Principal Solutions Architect, Amanda Babb, demonstrated how to connect technical teams with strategic initiatives using proven strategies and Jira Align. She also answered questions from our live audience ranging from which Agile at Scale and task prioritization methods work best with the tool to how to create a strategic snapshot in Jira Align; read on to learn what she had to say. 

Do you have to be running SAFe to use Jira Align?

The short answer? No. 

Jira Align works with any Agile at Scale framework. But there are key things to keep in mind– the people, the work, and the time boxes. You have to understand which people are doing what work and within which timeframe. These three are inextricably connected. You’ll get the most out of the tool if you commit to a standard definition of these items across the organization and can run in a synchronized cadence such as business quarters. My advice? Be disciplined, commit, and move forward.

Can you do most of these Gantts in advanced roadmaps? 

Yes, to a certain point. I love Advanced Roadmaps. In fact, before Jira Align became an Atlassian product, I called it the Bees Knees. However, when it comes to enterprise organizations that need to aggregate more program-level data into a more centralized view, it falls short. 

Advanced Roadmaps works really well at the Program layer (Teams of Teams), but as organizations start to expand and mature, they tend to seek alternative technologies and integrations with business intelligence tools for that bigger picture (Teams of Teams of Teams). It’s a progression, kind of like how we crawl and walk before we run. There is a time and a place in an organization's maturity level for Advanced Roadmaps, but eventually, you might outgrow it and require an enterprise platform like Jira Align.  

How does WSJF prioritization of epics work? 

With Jira Align, you can prioritize work based on anything you like. WSJF stands for – weighted shortest job first, where you take a look at complexity, level of effort, and other factors, and you calculate which task should be prioritized higher versus lower. 

Within that, there's usually the concept of your work tree and your cut line. It's called pull rank when you're prioritizing, and you can say I'd like to pull rank based on WSJF. That will prioritize the current work in the work tree and other child work based on WSJF. However, It all comes down to one thing: ensuring that you're entering the data correctly. You have to commit with the right people to enter that information as part of your process so that you can then use the technology to help you prioritize. With Jira Align all things are possible – the answer is always yes, we just need to make sure that your people and your processes are set up to facilitate good technology. 

What is a strategic snapshot in Jira Align and what does it represent?

A strategic snapshot is an aggregation of your goals, your aspirations, your mission, vision, and values on a cadence. In essence, the strategic snapshot represents an aspect of your company's strategy for a specific time period, typically a year, but could be shorter or longer. You can have a snapshot that represents the entire strategy for a year, as well as snapshots that represent a specific product strategy or specific value stream strategy.

Can I have a strategy per product or product family? 

Yeah, absolutely. What’s interesting (and we tell this to our clients all the time about the Atlassian products) is that you can do anything you want with Atlassian tools up to and including pouring beer, because we've done that before. One of the things that we want to recognize is the why... Why are you trying to accomplish something as an organization as well as within the platform itself?

Is it because that's how your strategy actually works? Or is that because you're being asked for a one-off report based on something you did three years ago? So my advice is to ask why and then examine the why to ensure it aligns with your strategy. 

Can you show the why button feature between Jira Align and Jira?

It’s really easy if you have access to Jira Align to go ahead and click that button, but not everybody needs access to Jira Align. Even if you have access to Jira Align, not everybody needs to be able to see absolutely everything in Jira Align. We can always speak with Atlassian regarding the correct ratio of licensing for each organization.

As an example, if I'm a developer, I want to know the WIIFM - What’s In It For Me. Why am I working on this story, why is it important, or why are we committing to it in a particular time frame? We can surface that information in Jira within the Jira Software Epic. If you're looking at a Story, you click on your epic and boom! You can see the strategy tree up to that Theme. This is really cool, because now, when a developer is working on the story, they know that it ties to this particular Jira software epic. 

But why is this important? It comes down to visibility, so everyone up and down the organization is aligned on a strategic level. If the whole team has access to the Strategy Tree, when there are competing priorities, teams can make informed decisions to help execute against that strategy. And that’s what every organization wants– business leaders want to understand what is happening with complex deliveries and teams want to understand the why behind strategic initiatives. With Jira Align you get both. 

How can I get buy-in throughout my organization to invest in Jira Align? 

We’re here to help. You can book a technical call to discuss your organization's specific needs. Explore our Jira Align Insight Report, co-authored with our friends at Atlassian for a deep dive into the tool that can help you share the benefits of Jira Align with your team.

Missed the live webinar? Tune in on-demand for an in-depth look into defining the connection between strategy and execution from the Portfolio to the Program within Jira Align.

Organizations are rapidly moving toward new work management styles, especially in the age of digital transformation. If you work in project management, you've probably heard the term "Agile" at some point in your career. Maybe you've considered taking this approach with your teams, and have already done some research. "Scrum" is another term you've most likely heard during your research. Although this is a term used in rugby, it is also a specific methodology teams use to work in an Agile manner. At Praecipio Consulting, we've assisted many teams 

with their move to Agile, using the Atlassian toolset to support and ease their journey. We've also worked with many teams who use Scrum specifically, but many use different frameworks - using Scrum is not a requirement to be Agile. Let's take a moment to understand the difference between Scrum and Agile.

What is Agile?

Agile is a project management style in which organizations use an iterative process to continuously deliver work while consistently receiving and incorporating feedback throughout the process. Flexibility is key, so teams can quickly adapt to market changes and customer needs. Agile has a set of principles and values organizations are expected to follow, laid out in the Agile Manifesto. The Agile Manifesto does not delve into specific practices and activities teams should follow in order to work in an Agile way: it serves as a north star for organizations to align to in their Agile journey. There are a few Agile frameworks teams can use to work in an iterative manner, such as Scrum and Kanban. Agile puts an emphasis on people over processes and tools, and gives autonomy to the people on those teams. With that being said, it is up to the teams to decide which framework works best for the way they work and the work they're delivering. 

What is Scrum?

Scrum is one of the many frameworks teams can use to work in an Agile manner. It is mainly used by software development teams, and relies on time-boxed iterations called Sprints. Sprints are made up of the work developers commit to completing within that iteration, typically 2 weeks. The work scheduled in each sprint is based on priority and team capacity, and is carefully estimated to ensure teams can commit the work they've delegated to the sprint. This framework is very detailed, and prescribes a set of specific roles and events, including:

• A Scrum Master, who protects the teams and ensures they are able to do their work without impediments.
• A Product Owner, who manages and grooms the product backlog ensuring the anticipated work aligns with the needs of the customer and business.
• The development team who actually complete the work in the sprint.

As I mentioned above, Scrum is a way teams can work if they're on their Agile journey, but it is not the only option. There are other Agile frameworks that may work better for teams.

How Do Agile and Scrum Differ?

Now that we know a bit more about Agile and Scrum separately, it's easier to lay out the differences between the two. Agile is more of a general philosophy that paints a broader picture around working in an iterative, flexible manner. Scrum is a specific Agile framework and is more granular than Agile. Although both rely on iterations: in Scrum they're specifically time boxed and called Sprints. Scrum also prescribes specific roles and ceremonies, while Agile focuses on the overall principles in the Agile Manifesto. Scrum is also more focused on the team level and the delivery of work. Agile can be scaled across an organization using other work frameworks such as the the Scaled Agile framework, or SAFe, as well as Large-Scale Scrum, styled as LeSS. 

With that understanding in mind, maybe you're ready to start your Agile journey! The Atlassian tools, such as Jira and Confluence, are built to support Agile and the specific frameworks. Jira Software makes it easy to get started with Scrum by providing an out-of-the-box Project template. At Praecipio Consulting, we focus on ensuring the Atlassian tools facilitate your Agile journey by implementing best practices and incorporating our extensive experience working with Agile teams. Reach out if you have any questions around Atlassian and Agile - we're here to help.

SaaS is the future

2020 has caused the world to work from the internet. Whatever you used to do in your own data centers can now be performed by vendors, be they cloud or software service providers, better, faster, more securely, and at less cost than you.

The diagram below indicates the trajectory of change from traditional to SaaS (software as a service). Learning how to manage SaaS providers is the new skill that must be learned and introduced into your strategy.

The hardships of this year have also proven that you need agility in your 5 year plan so that you can change along the way.  The capability to pivot based on circumstances is the other new capability of an organization moving towards a digital and VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity) future. You have to be agile, not just in IT, but the way you think, act, and react. Leadership has to manage and accelerate this change in culture and behavior, which means scaling new ways of working enabled by technology is the new management paradigm.

Allowing a SaaS provider to manage a core function such as Marketing, HR, or Sales is the norm, freeing you to concentrate on creating unique services that benefit your customers and save time for your staff. 

Scaled Agile Framework SAFe®

No matter what blend of Agile that you are using (Scrum, Kanban, DevOps, AgileITSM, XP, TDD, BDD, etc.), you will need to spread these practices across your business. New ways of working, constant improvement, collaboration, and the elimination of siloes, benefitting from technology, be it your own or others, is the only way to survive. 

Accomplishing this change means a dramatic, and in some cases, drastic, alteration to how things are currently performed:

• You keep your program office but lose your project mentality
• Product and Service Owners are the new organizational role with accountable budgets and teams
• Agile Budgeting replaces annual budgets, and the same occurs to annual reviews as constant and consistent feedback is provided top-down
• Multi-year contracts are swapped for partners that facilitate your agility
• The use of technology to keep you in business enables every aspect of your business
• Staff are not made redundant but instead acquire t-shaped skills
• Customer focus and shifting left from their request or needs drives your product strategy

Organizations need guidance to make these types of change successfully. Enter Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe®).  The diagram on their website visualizes the breadth of their philosophy and impact on an organization. 

SAFe® is a continually changing set of practices that has blended the technology, people, and business practices into a competency-based model: 

• Leadership based on agile and lean: empowerment, self-organization
• Team and Technical Agility: No defects, use of cloud & internet, open-source, SaaS
• Behavior-Driven Development (BDD): products based on the people use them
• Test-Driven Development: code, infrastructure, people feedback in short cycles
• Agile Product Delivery: small changes made often, usually daily
• Lean Portfolio Management: if it is not helping someone, then you don’t do it, constant improvement, reduced technical and cultural debt
• Lean Governance: common or standard data models, budgets are based on the value of outcomes and funded accordingly, guardrails guidelines both corporate and regulatory, business continuity and sustainability is a daily way of acting 
• Organizational Agility: long-term goals but very short-cycle plans capable of pivoting based on breaching a KPI or OKR (Outcome based vital indicators)
• Continuous Learning Culture: effort is rewarded, management changes to a coaching model from a telling model, relentless improvement is mentored, innovation is the goal

SAFe® is the most ambitious version of this framework's scaling technology, leadership, financial, and organizational practices. It supplies examples, training, templates, and a worldwide community of practitioners. It is not for everyone. It is not a program of introducing Safe® that will make it successful for you but instead a multi-year effort of scaling the way your business does things at every level into a new model. 

SAFe® helps you avoid and overcome these engrained practices:

• Budgets by department or project become funding for products and services
• Prioritization of new features or services is based on value of delivery and cost of delay
• Creating your own software is replaced by using open source or SaaS
• Data used and kept by your business is standardized for ease of maintenance and change to new services as needed
• Mapping the way you work end-to-end and ensuring any changes are not localized but instead improve the flow of work and data is the new program office structure.
• Change Approval Boards or freezes are stopped because you trust the testing and release process that has been enhanced and automated. 
• Design thinking is encouraged to solve problems
• Design thinking underpins making things as small and as standard as possible such that any part of your business can use it or improve it
• Everyone is thinking about what can I do to make things better, do things faster and safer, and how can I save effort or time or money

SAFe® Benefits

• Increase the velocity of change: ways people work and the software that supports these changes
• The software lifecycle of Demand-Approve-Develop-Integrate with other code-Unit Test-Performance Test-Submit to Live Approval-Go live is replaced with Experiment-Develop-Test-Go live
• SaaS + Cloud + Digital is the technology trilogy whereby owning your own technology is discouraged (still allowed where regulatory mandates leave no other option)
• Complex projects requiring months or effort are replaced by an understanding of what a new service or feature or technical update will provide a customer or staff member and therefore, this is what is created and deployed
• Technical stability is more critical than new service introductions (think of your customers and how angry they get when things go wrong)
• Feedback, monitoring, alerting are the trilogy of information collaboration and coordination (no silos)
• Legacy infrastructure or technical debt is mitigated by using cloud services aligned with your work and customer practices. Technology underpins the way you do things and not just there because!
• Training on SAFe® culture and practices is top-down and extends to your external suppliers
• Project Management is now Agile Product Management, coordinated across products and services instead of merely helping a department or team
• Prioritization based on what it fixes, how it meets a regulatory demand, what outcomes it being in terms of value and customer satisfaction, or how it helps staff perform a function

Doing SAFe® means:

• You are willing to release small chunks of change daily versus large pieces that might wait months before going live
• You can monitor the impact of that change in terms of issued caused or customer satisfaction
• If an issue ensues or satisfaction is not as expected, then you can easily roll-back the change with minimal effort or impact (go back to the way things were before)
• New skills of negotiating or always thinking of enhancing products via technology are taught in a variety of formats such as hackathons, formal training, a partner working, and management coaching
• Operating and Strategy long-term plans are replaced by short-term vision plans that are customer and market-centric
• Centers of Excellence or Software Factories are created aligning how people working based on data and technology mapping exercises with the approved practices of the organization, which encourages:
• Standard tooling for Enterprise Application/Service Lifecycle Management 
• Standard data and artifact repositories
• Use of SaaS providers for core activities
• Always on testing, monitoring, and alerting across the value chains

A train yard is a frequent analogy to explain software factories and centers of excellence. You need a standard gauge rail for all trains to use, and an aligned place for trains to be monitored and dispatched. This allows trains to move safely across the landscape, delivering people to their locations. Your organization needs to establish the same kind of software delivery practice. This model is what SAFe® uses to foster the fast and safe distribution of technology via an engineered flow of work.

SaaS Safe® tips

• Create a vision of why SaaS and Safe® are being adopted, underpinned by training
• Change the language used top-down from project to product
• Have metrics that make innovation for customers or staff the prime target
• Developers develop and operations keep things up is the most prominent IT silo. Break this by making product teams that own their product or service.
• Technology metrics of Defect Rejected Ratio, Detected Defects, Change Time compared to Market release, Value of Delivery versus Effort are viewed on product boards
• Create fun programs of change such as Kill the CAB, which force the introduction of standard technology components for use by any aspect of the business
• DevSecOps is not an option but a mandatory requirement: you have to test at every opportunity and use security practices and tools to keep your business safe and compliant
• Automate what you can as often as you can, but only if this improves the quality and speed of work

SaaS is the way of allowing someone else to perform a function via the use of their technology. Carefully avoiding vendor lock-in will make SaaS a credible option for your business. The transition to remote working has opened up a world linked by technology, and your organization needs to do the same by scaling the thinking and practices of technology to everything you do. SAFe® is a framework proving your business a set of rules that promotes scaling Agile, Lean, and DevOps across your organization. It is a radical alteration of your culture that will take time and leadership to embed successfully.

Whether implementing SaaS, SAFe® , or just generally digitally transforming your company, Praecipio Consulting can help!

Note: SAFe® is a Registered Trademark via ©Scaled Agile, Inc.

Are You Ready to Scale Agile? 

You are an Agile evangelist. You have championed the shift to Agile at your organization and have coached several teams successfully. Your organization is delivering quality product faster to your internal and external customers. But there's still a struggle to coordinate across different parts of the organization. And you get pulled into meeting after meeting to coordinate across teams. As a result, your most successful teams are expressing frustration with each other and, and now, quality has slipped. Something has to change. 

You've heard about scaling Agile. You may even have an idea of some of the well-known frameworks, such as SAFe, LeSS, Scrum@Scale, etc. But are you ready? Is your organization ready to scale Agile? 

Organizational Readiness

While this is not an exhaustive list, ask yourself and your organization these questions to assess your readiness to scale Agile. 

• Which framework is best for your organization?
• Do you have management and executive buy-in? 
• Do you have funding for external training and certification?
• Can you group teams together to support strategic initiatives?
• Can you identify your change agents and champions?
• Can you identify a set of teams to pilot the change?
• How much time are you willing to commit to the change?
• How much time do you have to commit to the change? 
• How much time are you willing to commit to continuous learning? 

Iterate Your Framework Implementation

Just like the scaled Agile frameworks themselves, you approach their implementation iteratively. One of our clients chose and implemented SAFe for a single program and scaled iteratively. They started with one Agile Release Train and in three years scaled to four Agile Release Trains with the intention to launch an additional train before the end of the year. They also reorganized the Trains once they realized they were no longer organized around value and instead were structured in a traditional resource-management way. 

The implementation of SAFe within this client's organization, while it had a specific start date, was implemented iteratively and over time. It also took the backing of management and executives and a devoted set of change agents willing to take the steps for scale.

We here at Praecipio Consulting have assisted our clients in their journeys to scale Agile. Let us know how we can help you take your first step. 

SAFe 5.0 puts a greater focus on the customer, placing them at the heart of all decisions around the product or service the business delivers. Although the technical and functional aspects of a product are key, the satisfaction of the customer ultimately decides the true fate of the solution. If the customer continues to have a positive experience, your business can continue to grow and thrive! In the updated SAFe 5.0 framework, Scaled Agile elaborates on Customer Centricity, which puts the customer at the center of all business decisions that guide an organization to not only meet customer needs but exceed them as well.

What is Customer Centricity?

Customer Centricity is the mindset that the business must adopt to provide a positive experience for the customer. With every decision business leaders make, how those decisions impact the customer must be at the forefront of their minds. For this reason, the organization studies market research and user insight to ensure they truly understand the customer's pain points and develop solutions to address them. Customer-centric organizations take new approaches to solving customer problems by using empathetic design, i.e. putting themselves in the shoes of the customer. In turn, the organization can fully engage with the customer and build long-lasting relationships with them. After all, this is what we try and capture in User Stories; however, in SAFe 5.0, we're capturing this information at every level of the organization to build the right solutions.

Why is Customer Centricity important?

Customer Centricity is important because customer satisfaction is the key to developing a business and maintaining it. If your solutions and services fail your customers, your business will also fail. This new focal point also matters because it allows organizations to get direct feedback and input from the customer. Listening to their ideas and opinions allows businesses to tailor the solutions to their exact needs, which increases company profits, attracts new customers, and enhances current customer relationships.

How does Customer Centricity Affect Me/My Organization?

As an individual and as an organization, this piece of the framework may change your mindset and the entire company vision when it comes to creating solutions. When in the decision-making process, whether on your own or collectively as an organization, the outcomes that affect the customer will need to guide those decisions. As an individual working on client solutions, you may sometimes get requests that aren't necessarily best practice. Using Customer Centricity, you can consult user and market research to arrive at a solution that is best practice while also satisfying the customer.

Our Thoughts on Customer Centricity

At Praecipio Consulting, we are excited about this emphasis on Customer Centricity, as we love providing an exceptional customer experience. While working on our projects, we gather customer feedback daily to ensure we're moving projects in the right direction. With this, we're also able to revise on an iterative basis, meaning changes are made consistently throughout the project, instead of piling up and causing delays at the end of the project delivery. We also find that this approach allows us to truly be customer-centric, as we are constantly engaging with the customer and strengthening our relationship with them. Internally, we keep a close eye on the updates to SAFe so we can practice it successfully, as well as guide clients through the changes as well.

Contact us today to learn how our Digital Transformationists can help your organization scale successfully.

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.