As a Solution Architect at Atlassian, my team has had the opportunity to work alongside Praecipio, one of our Agile at Scale Specialized partners, for some time now. We've collaborated to ensure that some of our largest customers received the right level of support and guidance needed to successfully scale their agile practices with Jira Align. In my current role, combined with over 10 years of experience as an agile coach, the biggest challenge I’ve often seen an Agile inspired group attempt to overcome is deciding what practices and ceremonies to standardize on. The question is often asked: How do we stay true to the agile manifesto and empower the people that do the work to continuously improve? 

Rather than just tell you what a given Portfolio, Product Pillar or Business Unit needs to standardize to scale their agile practice, I want to discuss the ‘why’ from the lens of an impacted customer because focusing on the customer impact is how you reduce waste and surface the need for standardization in the spirit of agile. In my observation, below are the top five most impactful areas for standardization to unlock scaled agility.

Top Five Standardization Essentials:

1. Product Quality Principles. This is the working agreement among those that build the product and those that manage the product; examples include engineering excellence practices like continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD), test-driven development (TDD), user experience design and definition of ready before releasing to market. Establishing product quality principles is important because defects make customers very unhappy. They break down customer trust and loyalty, and lead to lost revenue.

2. Retrospectives. These are regular recurring events that surface impediments or opportunities across all teams and at each team level. These are important because problems do not resolve themselves, and teams need to be empowered to improve their ways of working.  This is also how wasteful processes that have not proven to serve the customer’s best interest are surfaced. A poorly run organization is obvious to customers. They want to engage with providers who advance their products and services on a regular basis.

3. Common Work Object Definition. Work objects describe what we hope to achieve and roughly how long it might take, such as epics, features and stories. It is important to clearly define the documentation structure for each work object, the timeframes, and ownership expectations, so that planning and working rhythms can be established. Customers want to receive value early and often. A common work definition enables the organization to break up product delivery and feature enhancements into achievable goals.

4. Estimation System. An estimation system is used to describe the work to be delivered and level of effort or complexity it will probably require, such as story points or t-shirt sizes. It is important to estimate delivery objects because estimation drives meaningful conversations that surface barriers and feasibility. Near term product roadmaps and the ability to deliver on a release plan depend on how well teams can plan their work. Customers establish loyalty when they see a roadmap containing the things they ask for and they actually receive them in a reasonable amount of time.

5. People and Team Structure. This is the way people are organized and grouped together. Agile at scale adoption will result in operational changes and it is important to structure teams around the value stream in a way that maximizes the flow of communication, feedback loops, and market delivery. An organizational structure that is compatible with the agile operational model reduces dependencies across teams, wasteful processes, wait times and impediments. Customers benefit the most from an optimized people and team structure because they are receiving value as quickly as possible with the best quality.  

Now that I’ve shared my top five essential areas of standardization, I want to hear your thoughts on how challenging you believe it would be for your organization to implement them. Do you believe there is a different set of standards that are more impactful to scaling agile practices? Connect with me on LinkedIn and let me know your thoughts!

Interested in learning more? Check out our co-authored whitepaper, The Connected Enterprise: Close the Gap Between Business Strategy & Execution or Contact Praecipio for a personalized demo! We'd love to share the benefits of Jira Align with you and your team.

We’ve compiled a list of the most popular content determined by our readers from all of 2022. With recurring topics like Confluence Optimization, Atlassian Cloud Migration and Agile Transformation, it’s evident that 2022 was the year of getting things done. According to our research, the following resources are our most-loved and viewed throughout last year:

1. Whitepaper: The Connected Enterprise: Close the Gap Between Business Strategy & Execution

Together with the experts at Atlassian, we explore how Jira Align as a platform - when implemented well, can help to improve visibility and coordination so that organizations can adapt more quickly. We dive into how Jira Align provides seamless user experiences that leads to large-scale transformation success, the importance of properly configuring the platform, and how Jira Align helped enterprise clients uncover and resolve issues through real-time feedback loops and faster decision-making cycles.

2. Ebook: 6 Steps to a Successful Atlassian Cloud Migration

This eBook walks you through the steps that organizations should follow to plan, prepare for, and carry out an Atlassian Cloud migration. Learn what to expect before migrating, how to avoid common mistakes during the migration process, and how Praecipio used these six steps to guide Castlight Health through a successful Atlassian Cloud migration.

3. Ebook: How ITSM Drives Business Transformation

As customers continue to demand better products and always-on services from companies, ITSM sits at the center of meeting their expectations and delivering value faster. This eBook walks you through the ITSM practices that are essential for keeping up with today's fast-paced world and accelerating business transformation. Learn how to modernize your IT operations, facilitate collaboration, and deliver new services with agility by leveraging this customer-centric approach.

4. Webinar: Proving Value: How Business Leaders Use Jira Align to Connect Strategy and Execution

In this webinar we define the connection between strategy and execution from the Portfolio to the Program within Jira Align. We guide you from ideation through prioritization, planning for execution, commitment to the backlogs, and tracking progress, investment, and status. By the end of the webinar, Praecipio will demystify how Atlassian, and specifically Jira Align, can help you mature within Lean Portfolio Management.

5. Blog: How to Report in Confluence with the Jira Issues Macro

The Jira Issues Macro bridges the powerful, native link between Jira and Confluence. With it, you can report on Jira in Confluence seamlessly. This one macro can solve many of your reporting needs in Confluence. What's more, you can provide context around the data instead of just straight data. The Jira Macro is a great way to keep team members informed without navigating from Confluence to Jira and back again.

6. Blog: How to Solve Too Many Confluence Email Notifications

In this blog we walk you through all the ways to reconfigure your Confluence notification preferences so that your email doesn’t become clogged with notifications that are not important to you. Free up the space in your inbox and save yourself time later by updating your Confluence settings now using this blog as your guide.

7. Blog: Scrum Sprint Planning: How Long Should Sprints Be?

Teams new to scrum face lots of decisions – one critical decision for teams to perform efficiently is determining sprint length. Every team's needs are different, and there's rarely a one-size-fits-all approach to planning the length and organization of your sprint. While there are arguments for the varying lengths of sprints in scrum, this blog lays out some standard variables that you and your team should consider.

8. Blog: Affects Version vs. Fix Version in Jira: The Difference

Both the Affects version and Fix version are automatically created in Jira out of the box. They are related to Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) projects and are the foundation of releases in Jira. While they are linked and work in tandem at some points, there is a best practice when using the versions inside of both of these fields. This blog defines what each field is and how to properly utilize them.

9. Blog: Best Practices for Jira Epics

Discover how to make the best use of your Jira instance with Jira Epics. We walk you through what an Epic is and the importance of knowing the various workflows and requirements uniquely available for Epics, how to use these features to get on track with your agile project management, and provide you with some basic do’s and dont’s centered around Epics.

10. Blog: Maximizing Jira Align's Value Prop to Deliver Value Faster

Jira Align is truly a unicorn product that brings teams and information closer together for improved visibility, faster decision-making, and greater agility. When configured correctly and in a way that meets the specific needs of the client, Jira Align helps organizations reach that sweet spot where they connect strategy to work execution and eventually achieve true enterprise transformation. In this blogpost, we dive into what makes Jira Align such a powerful tool and how organizations can maximize this enterprise platform to deliver value faster. 

We're on a mission to help teams execute on the work that matters most, through a customizable approach built on Enterprise Agility, Cloud, App Dev, Dev Ops, and the powerful Atlassian platform and beyond, we can help you GET IT DONE, by removing the systems-level obstacles preventing you from DOING. We hope this list inspires you to take the next step in achieving your business goals. Should you need assistance our team of experts is here to help.

We’re so excited to begin creating more helpful resources this year to help you continue to drive your business forward and add value to your organization’s digital infrastructure. 

Welcome 2023; let’s get things done!

Plus 3 Ways Agile Coaches Can Help Businesses Close Their Readiness Gaps 

Almost every organization struggles to some degree with connecting strategy to execution–only 3% of companies say they have done it “very successfully.” 

Something gets lost in translation when the c-suite tries to communicate an organization’s strategy to delivery teams, and then lost again when delivery teams try to communicate progress back up to the c-suite. In fact, in a survey by Harvard Business Review researchers found that only “55% of middle managers can name even one of their company’s top five priorities.” 

The pain points exist in three main areas across a company’s people, process, and technology: Lack of visibility, lack of coordination, and an inability to adapt. 

To help improve all three of those pain points, many teams consider technology like Jira Align, which promises to “connect your business strategy to technical execution.” 

Jira Align is definitely not plug and play, and is not appropriate for every organization. So, how do you decide if your organization is ready for a platform like Jira Align? And how can you, as an agile coach or transformation office team member, begin to close the gaps in order to prepare the organization (and yourself) for this technology?

Let’s find out by looking at eight ways to know if your organization is ready for Jira Align.

Success with Jira Align Requires Agile Leadership

Historically, (including in the most recent State of Agile Report and State of Agile Coaching Report), the main blocker for an agile organization is leadership. So it is no surprise that the first two indicators that a company is ready to adopt Jira Align are also leadership focused.

1. A c-level leadership team with a clear vision for an agile transformation is by far the top indicator that a business is ready for Jira Align. Jira Align can’t put an organization on a path of agile transformation, it can only illuminate the path that the business is already on.
   
   
2. Many organizations have an executive sponsor who believes in the agile transformation and offers support. To be ready for Jira Align, your business needs an executive champion.
   
   What’s the difference between an executive champion and an executive sponsor? The executive champion takes an active leadership role in a Jira Align implementation and the concurrent agile transformation, and is positioned high enough in the organization to make decisions.

The leadership team is the first and most obvious place for you, as an agile coach or implementation lead, to begin to close the readiness gaps for your organization. Work with the c-suite to explain what agile is, how it affects their work, and their role in a successful agile transformation. 

Ask leadership to appoint an executive champion, perhaps a Chief Transformation Officer, who has real authority, can dedicate time, and will build a team to support the change effort.

To help educate others about the need for Jira Align, work with a Jira Align partner to hold a workshop with the organization’s leaders. In a few hours, a skilled Jira Align expert can demonstrate some of the most glaring problems separating strategy from execution, and talk through ways to close those gaps. 

Often, seeing the scope of a problem first-hand–and how the platform can give visibility to that problem–gives leadership much more energy around investing in agile transformation with Jira Align as the technology platform solution.

Success with Jira Align Requires an Investment in Change  

Forrester Consulting’s Total Economic Impact study found that Jira Align has helped customers achieve up to 340% ROI, so it’s clearly worth the investment. But beyond the tool-related investment costs, the organization has to be willing to invest in change, and to have the patience to go through the associated growing pains. 

Indicators three through five, then, are all about an organization’s commitment to change. 

1. Investing in Jira Align is as much an investment in changing the mindset of the organization as it is an investment in technology. The funding for training and coaching (both for agile-at-scale frameworks like SAFe® and in Jira Align itself) should be on par with a transformation. Without training and coaching, businesses will not get the desired results from Jira Align.
   
   
2. The organization must be willing not only to fund the change, they have to also have active change management in place to embrace that change. Successfully implementing Jira Align requires significant shifts in organizational thinking and processes. This will result in significant discomfort across the organization as process changes and mindset shifts are in progress. Working through that discomfort is painful, but ultimately worth it.
   
   
3. Jira Align is designed to align teams throughout the organization. Doing this will likely require teams to change the way they work and the tools they use for that work to standardize data and reporting. Complying with standards will take not only strong change management, but also strong coaching on the why behind the changes.

The whitepaper The Connected Enterprise: Close the Gap Between Strategy and Execution presents some valuable statistics and a model case study to help showcase how much more an organization benefits when its teams know they are building the right things, at the right time, for the right people.

Hold informational sessions such as lunch-and-learn programs around how much more autonomy and creativity teams will have when leadership can see in real time how the work they are doing is related to the strategy. Explore a quick demo of Jira Align’s “why” button, which when properly configured provides all of the context behind each feature, epic, and theme from inside Jira Software, including the business case behind an item’s priority.

Source: https://www.atlassian.com/blog/jira-align/ask-why-to-unlock-organizational-change

If it does not already exist, create a transformation office. Once formed, the transformation teams can begin meeting monthly or quarterly to gauge progress, remove impediments, formalize processes.

Scaling is another coaching opportunity. Introduce teams to agile at scale within their current context.  Discuss how small but impactful changes at the team level can help create standardized metrics that add visibility not only to the c-suite but between teams as well. This automated visibility can eventually expose and decrease dependencies between teams, meaning less time spent in meetings and more time spent creating and delivering value.

Other agile coaching opportunities may include: formalized ways to prioritize programs to achieve strategic goals (e.g., WSJF) and/or lean portfolio management.

Success with Jira Align Requires Realistic Expectations

Before going all in with Jira Align, it’s important to set realistic expectations not only about what the platform does and does not do, but about how long it will take, and how much technical expertise will be required to realize all of its benefits. That brings us to the last three indicators that an organization is ready for Jira Align:

1. To be successful with Jira Align, the organization and its leadership first must understand that Jira Align is not a reporting system. Jira Align is a living system. It is an enterprise agile transformation platform designed to enable collaboration at all levels, every single day. Sure, it has a powerful reporting component. But the greatest value enabling mindset transformation and value delivery are in the live views.
   
   
2. Implementing Jira Align takes time. An initial pilot at the program (team of teams) level can be implemented within 3 months for a single program. A full implementation modeling the firm from Enterprise/Strategy to Team levels will take at least 12 months.
   
   Internalizing the related mindset, processes, and practices will take as long as a typical successful agile-at-scale transformation:18 - 36 months.
   
   
3. Last but not least, the organization will need to bring in training and technical expertise. For Jira Align to work as intended, it must interface smoothly with team-level tools. That’s why it’s critical for the organization to have competent Jira or Azure DevOps (ADO) admins or reliable, dedicated Modern Service Management that can perform that function. In addition, organizations will need dedicated technical expertise to support the configuration and integration into the existing technical ecosystem.

Here’s the third and final place where agile transformation coaches can really dig in and use Jira Align for their own benefit as well as the organization’s benefit. Learn Jira Align well enough to use its built-in feedback loops to coach teams, measure the organization's agile transformation progress, and report on return on investment.

You’ve likely had to learn tools before to support and help teams: from Trello to Miro to Jira Software. Jira Align is no different. What is different, though, is how you can use the live views and reporting metrics inside Jira Align to measure your own success in enabling the organizational transformation.  

You can learn about features such as framework maps that let you map framework implementation activity to the Jira Align implementation, resulting in a visual map of the organization’s progress. Check out a process step Kanban board for all the teams’ work items, from stories to features to epics to themes. View and review the Work Tree using multiple filters such as the Strategy View, Top-Down View from Portfolio, or Bottom-Up from Story. 

Already, 14% of respondents in the 2022 State of Agile Report report using Jira Align. As that number increases, coaches will need to quickly interpret teams’ progress and areas for improvement as easily as they do today, but within Jira Align. Knowing Jira Align provides a competitive advantage within the industry. 

Get Ready for Jira Align

As more and more organizations begin to apply agility outside of just software teams, the need for technology like Jira Align is only going to increase. About half of State of Agile survey respondents say they apply agile practices to the entire application delivery lifecycle. And two-thirds are using Atlassian’s Jira to manage their agile projects already.

Jira Align helps to solve so many problems organizations face at scale, including real-time visibility, aligning every team to strategy, and optimizing for customer value. And, it claims to be the only platform that lets organizations implement and extend any framework at scale, including hybrid and custom frameworks.

It won’t be long before your organization is asking to implement Jira Align. Start getting them–and you–ready today.

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 our second blog of our Advanced Roadmaps Blog Series, we will focus on the importance of good information structure and how it can improve your Advanced Roadmaps plan. In our first blog of the series, we discussed how Advanced Roadmaps works and how it can help teams scale operations and drive better business outcomes. Now we will dive into how to set up your information in Jira to make an effective plan.

When creating a plan, it's imperative that the plan is using great structure and information. Great structure helps derive insights more effectively and makes the plan easier to understand. I always like to compare plan building in Advanced Roadmaps to baking cookies. When baking cookies, it's important that quality ingredients are used and those ingredients are being used in the right amounts. The same goes for Advanced Roadmaps plans! In this case, the Jira information are our ingredients and the structure of that information is our recipe. An Advanced Roadmaps plan is only as good as its information structure. Leveraging good information and repeatedly using a solid structure makes for making great cookies, err, I mean plans! Is anybody hungry here?

Hierarchy

Information structure includes numerous pieces, the first being the work hierarchy. It's important that your team establishes a hierarchy of work items and leverages that hierarchy consistently. Advanced Roadmaps accommodates the varying work hierarchies teams use. Some teams may have a hierarchy of epics all the way down to tasks. Some teams may just use stories and sub-tasks. Those are just a few examples. As long as structure is established and it is being used properly, you're well on your way!

Advanced Roadmaps will reflect this hierarchy within the plan that you build. Work from Jira is grouped together based on the hierarchy within projects and how those issues are linked. In the Advanced Roadmaps plan, the information is shown in a tiered view so you can quickly see how lower level work, like stories and tasks, tie to higher level work, like epics and initiatives. 

It's important that the team, or teams, included in the plan are thinking about the work in the same hierarchy. This comes in handy when discussing work at each level and teams can understand the magnitude of the work being done. When everyone is on the same page they can strategize and plan work more effectively. 

Jira Projects

The next piece of the structure involves the Jira projects that are included in the plan. The information that is reflected in plans can come from full Jira projects or boards within those projects. The information that is included in the issues will be displayed on the plan. Project configurations and how well information is recorded across projects will have an impact on the effectiveness of the plan.

If your team is including information across multiple projects, project configuration becomes extremely important. Sharing configurations across projects means they will use the same statuses, screens, workflows, and fields. These shared configurations have significant benefits. Statuses can be reduced, which makes it easier to understand the stage of the work being done across projects. Work is grouped together in the plan in a much cleaner fashion.

Shared configurations also result in a more standard way of recording information. There will be more consistency in the information that is filled out within Jira issues. For example, having a configuration that requires start and end dates enhances all related plans. If requiring this information wasn't standard, it would be more difficult to plan out incoming work. Sharing configurations is extremely beneficial as you start to add more and more project to the plan

Filtering and Linking Issues

Filtering information going into a plan is a good way to highlight the most important work for your team. Advanced Roadmaps has a filtering feature that allows you to include information that you want given a certain criteria. An effective filtering method that I have seen is filtering issues by issue type. There is a limit on the number of issues that can go into a plan. Filtering out certain issue types reduces noise from work you might not want to see. For example, a large number of sub-tasks can be present within a project and may not be necessary for the plan. Adding those sub-tasks into the plan can make the plan busy and could distract from more important information. Advanced Roadmaps enables users to filter those issues out. This creates more room for the relevant work that you want to track.

Advanced Roadmaps can display links between Jira issues. Consistently linking issues, when applicable, within Jira can provide additional context to your plan. Issue linking helps show how work items depend on one another and can show how issues relates to higher level work. This practice also helps track dependencies, which can help you more accurately plan and prioritize work with your plan.

Good information structure is very important to creating an effective plan to drive success. Hierarchy, standardization, filtering, and linking are great ways to make the plan look good, but they are also important when you start strategizing and communicating with your plan. 

In the next blog of our Advanced Roadmaps blog series, we will discuss how to plan capacity by using the tool. Advanced Roadmaps provides many features that can help your team plan workload effectively. Please stay tuned!

Reach out to Praecipio if you would like to learn more about Advanced Roadmaps and how it can help your business or team implement Agile at Scale practices. 

Teams new to scrum face lots of decisions – one critical decision for teams to perform efficiently is determining sprint length. Every team's needs are different, and there's rarely a one-size-fits-all approach to planning the length and organization of your sprint.

What is Scrum? How long should sprints be?

What is Scrum? Scrum is an Agile framework that gives teams guidelines on how to complete their work. It contains sets of roles, ceremonies, and considerations for how your work is completed.

An Agile sprint is a concept in scrum that represents a time box, i.e., a short amount of time the team has committed to complete the work. And how long is a sprint in Agile? Sprints in scrum can be as long as you want; however, it's most common for sprint length to be between 1 and 4 weeks. Teams running Scrum sprints need to decide what makes sense for them.

We often see that team's first instincts lean toward the extreme: Either 1-week sprints or 4-weeks sprints. While there are arguments for the varying lengths of sprints in scrum, here are some standard variables that you and your team should consider.

Sprint Planning for Planned vs. Unplanned Work

Before sprint planning begins, it's essential to define what you want to accomplish during that sprint. Instead of using overarching strategic objectives to guide your team, sprint goals should be smaller, more attainable chunks of work that can be completed in a shorter timeframe. 

If you are an Agile Scrum team with high variability in your work, longer sprints may give you the necessary buffer to complete the job. If you've got a 1-week sprint (with 1 of your 5 days already dedicated to ceremonies), even one or two random pieces of work can prevent your team from completing the work in the committed scope.

On the other hand, if the team has unplanned work with a lower level of urgency, Scrum sprint lengths that are shorter allow you to include the work in your Scrum sprint planning within a shorter period.

As far as how to best manage work, Jira is a great tool to help teams achieve this. Here's a guide on starting, managing, and completing a sprint using Jira. 

Time Dedicated to Scrum Ceremonies

How much time per week should sprint planning to be spent in scrum, retrospectives, backlog grooming, and demos? Shorter sprints mean more time is spent in these meetings. This becomes even more essential if you do not have dedicated roles (scrum master, product owner).

What we see in 1-week sprints is that teams can lose a full day (twenty percent of the sprint!) of each sprint to demos, retros, and planning. So the shorter your Agile sprints are in scrum, the more often you're having these ceremonies.

Size and Scope of Tasks

Is your work small enough to be completed in the sprint length? For example, if you are often not completing work in 1 sprint, a longer sprint in scrum may make sense (or you may just need to work on improving properly sizing your tasks).

Feedback Cycle

How often do I want to see and evaluate completed work? Is it acceptable to go 4 weeks without demonstrating the work that's being done? Do you need to know every week? Sprint length determines how often you see sprint demos and complete sprint retrospectives.

Inspection and Adaptation

There's no one-size-fits-all answer to optimal Scrum sprint length, and iteration is the key to scrum - so don't worry if your first choice doesn't work for your team. That's what your retrospectives are for, after all!

For more background on how we do Agile at Scale, read our case study on how Praecipio Consulting helped an enterprise client accelerate their Agile transformation.

Is your organization going through an Agile transformation? Learn about this robust framework and how our team can help your organization drive successful business outcomes through our Agile at Scale implementations. 

Please reach out if you have questions or are considering how to migrate your team to an agile approach.

As organizations continue to scale Agile practices, our team at Praecipio is frequently asked which Atlassian product will best support the effort. Principal Consultant, Brian Nye, put together a great webinar describing the differences between Advanced Roadmaps for Jira (formerly known as Portfolio for Jira) and Jira Align. As Praecipio has expanded our Jira Align practice, we'd like to take a moment to compare and contrast these products to help guide you in making the right decision for your organization. 

Your Agile and Digital Transformation Journey

Your organization can't talk about your Agile transformation without talking about your digital transformation and vice versa. After all, the Atlassian products are meant to support Agile frameworks as well as your digital transformation. Many organizations have embraced remote work as a result of the global pandemic and have fundamentally shifted toward online planning, road mapping, and execution management. 

Your organization may also use non-Atlassian applications to manage planning and road mapping. You've chosen to integrate these products with Atlassian for execution management. While this may be a great solution in the short term, I challenge this as a long-term solution. Many of the frameworks guiding agile-at-scale exist because we're trying to bring strategic planning closer to actual execution and back again. Ask your organization the hard question: does maintaining these integrations follow the organization's digital technology vision for the future? 

Advanced Roadmaps for Jira (formerly Portfolio for Jira)

Available as an App for Data Center/Server Deployments and packaged with Jira Software Cloud Premium, Advanced Roadmaps for Jira (Advanced Roadmaps) is a great way to bridge the gap for small- to medium-sized organizations. If you currently have fewer than 500 agile team members executing their work in Jira Software, Advanced Roadmaps for Jira can provide visibility within and across teams. First, define the hierarchy above the Jira Software Epic. We use Initiative most frequently when deploying this for customers because of the reference documentation from Atlassian. However, you can choose whichever naming convention you'd like as long as there is a corresponding Issue Type. For example, create an "Initiative" Issue Type and link it to a Hierarchy level in Advanced Roadmaps called "Initiative." We also strongly recommend the Initiative Issue Type live in a separate Jira Project from all other execution work. This helps your Agile teams focus on the current backlog of work while the Initiative moves through its own review, decision, and backlog refinement process. 

Creating a Plan is as simple as defining your source data (Jira Projects, Boards, or Filters), tying the sources to Teams, and choosing Releases from your source data. Honoring the Iron Triangle of project and program management, you may either choose to have the Plan dictate your schedule or, when planning for the next business quarter, you may choose to drag and drop the Gantt-style bars to schedule work. There is also an option to blend the calculations. Meaning, if a Sprint already exists and is pre-filled, let the Scrum Board be the source of truth. Have the Plan calculate any Empty Sprints going forward. The same is true for Releases and Teams: the Plan can auto-schedule a Team or a Release based on the relative rank of the backlog in the Plan. 

If you're looking to understand the impact of shifting priorities, you can enable Scenarios in a Plan. This will allow you to pull the source data from Jira Software and blend it with additional planning while maintaining the current execution schedule. You can add new Initiatives, Epics, and Stories, as well as adjust Release Dates, and observe the impact of adding, removing, or reassigning Teams to work. If you have the Server or Data Center App, you can group Plans together into a Program to understand the overall health of multiple Plans and Releases in a single view. 

Jira Align

As its name implies, Jira Align brings strategic planning and execution together in a single product. Pulling execution data from Jira Software and blending it with Agile-at-scale frameworks, Jira Align ties your strategic vision to tangible work and is best suited for organizations with more than 500 Agile team members executing their work in Jira Software. Instead of trying to define a hierarchy, Jira Align provides a pre-set hierarchy with flexible language. Whether you're running SAFe, LeSS, Scrum@Scale, or your own model, Jira Align's seamless integration with Jira Software provides visibility across multiple Portfolios and Programs. 

Jira Align comes in three deployment options: multi-tenant Cloud, single-tenant Cloud, and on-premise. While we recognize the allure of an on-premise solution, Praecipio recommends either the multi-tenant or single-tenant Cloud deployment. This provides the robust functionality of the product without the additional IT infrastructure management as well as managing routine maintenance such as upgrades. Jira Align also comes in two licensing models, Standard and Enterprise, billed monthly per user. Standard provides your organization the ability to run Programs (also known as teams of teams) whereas Enterprise adds the Lean Portfolio Management and financials into the mix. In addition, each Jira Align seat comes with four Jira, Trello, or integrated users. Another key difference between the two license levels is integration. With Standard, you can integrate a single instance of Jira Software with Jira Align. This is perfect for the organization that is large enough but lacks maturity in their Agile-at-scale framework. Enterprise provides unlimited connectors, which in the case of some of our clients, allows them to avoid the pain of merging multiple instances of Jira Software before deploying Jira Align. 

The Jira Software Epic is the lynchpin of the integration. Teams will still work with Epics, Stories, and Sub-Tasks within Jira Software whereas Product Managers, Release Train Engineers, Portfolio Managers, and Executives work within Jira Align. The robust permissions within Jira Align also focus the right role in the right data. A Program Manager may care about the execution of the program, whereas the executive wants to understand how you're tracking to the annual corporate strategy. By aggregating and rolling data upward, Jira Align provides health and status monitoring of quarterly, yearly, and long-term goals. With over 180 out-of-the box reports, every role at every level can access the right information at the right time to ensure your organization's success. Jira Align also has Enterprise Insights, an optional App, to take business intelligence to the next level. 

Which one is right for my organization? 

The first questions to answer while you're evaluating either tool are around Agile transformation maturity, digital transformation maturity, and user discipline both across and vertically in the organization. Because both options rely on teams to perform their execution work consistently and with good data integrity, either product can be a blessing or a curse. 

• How long have your Agile teams been executing within an agile framework? 
• How long have your Agile teams been executing within Jira Software? 
• How consistent are your teams across the organization? 
• Do your teams and your business understand one another and communicate well? 
• How well has your Jira Software instance been governed since it was deployed?
• How much chaff do you have in Jira Software? 

While this is not an exhaustive list, implementing either Advanced Roadmaps for Jira or Jira Align requires you to ask tough questions of your organization. Praecipio can not only help you assess your current state, but we can also provide guidance and recommendations to accelerate your digital transformation. For a detailed look into how Jira Align can transform your organization, read our recent whitepaper. 

If you are ready to take the next step in your digital transformation and Agile journeys, let's chat!

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.

As an Agile evangelist and a Digital Transformation-ist, I am asked this question from time to time. My first thought is, "Of course you're Agile...you just don't know it yet," but before I can actually answer that question, I have to understand the process. Every organization and agency in the world takes something, does something with it, and produces an end result. It's the process that is key for you and your organization to understand before implementing the Atlassian tools and specifically, Advanced Roadmaps for Jira (formerly known as Portfolio for Jira). 

At Praecipio Consulting, we call ourselves a bunch of process nerds that just happen to use the Atlassian tools to facilitate work. Think about making a pot of coffee: there are specific steps you have to take in a specific order to be successful. Starting the coffee pot before adding water and coffee doesn't work. Adding water and starting the coffee pot (without coffee) doesn't work either. There's a specific process that you need to follow to produce a pot of coffee. 

When it comes to work, what's the first step? How does the organization take in work? For those running traditional models, you may know this as Requirements. We have an idea that we'd like to propose, gather the requirements, and define the project scope. We then move to Design: expected function and architecture, and then to Implementation: actually putting the requirements into place in a product. In each of those phases, Advanced Roadmaps for Jira can help! 

What is Advanced Roadmaps for Jira? 

Advanced Roadmaps for Jira is a planning and roadmapping tool from Atlassian. It was first released in 2015 and has since developed into a powerful visualization tool for small-to-medium-sized organizations. With Atlassian's dedication to maintaining framework flexibility, it has evolved to become the tool of choice for many organizations, regardless of their self-proclamation. By supporting three estimation statistics (Days, Hours, and Story Points), Advanced Roadmaps for Jira can provide you with the best chance of success for understanding cross-team and organizational dependencies and answering the most important question, "When will this be done?" Purpose-built for Jira Software, Advanced Roadmaps for Jira supports mixed methodologies as well as framework-specific organizations. Add in the concept of multi-layer hierarchies, and you've got yourself a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) as well as the ability to automatically schedule timelines based on Team capacity or velocity. 

Advanced Roadmaps for Jira adheres to the concept of the Iron Triangle. What is the scope? What is the timeline? Who are the resources (people) involved? Based on the estimated scope of work, the timeline in which I need to get it done by, and the people I have to do it with, will it be available on time? Simply choose the estimation statistic to calculate a schedule and you're off! Well, almost...

Scope: Where is the work being tracked in Jira? 

When creating a Plan in Advanced Roadmaps for Jira, the first thing to understand is the source. After establishing your hierarchy, determine where these Jira Issues exist. Where is work being performed in Jira? Is it in a specific Jira Project? Or perhaps a Kanban board for process visualization? Or across multiple projects? These are the sources for creating a Plan. You can use Jira Projects, Boards, or Filters as the source for a Plan. You can also use any combination thereof. However, aim for simplicity: use a Jira Project or a Board when you are able to instead of a complicated Filter as a source. 

We recommend using Filters as a source only when you need to manage stage-gates in your process. Using the example above, If the Statuses in your Jira Workflow are Requirements, Design, and Implementation, consider creating a filter that excludes Requirements. Just because it's a good idea, doesn't mean we will pursue it past the Requirements stage. In a Plan, we only want to see those things that made it through the stage-gate into Design. It's in the Design stage we will determine if or when we can get it done based on the timeline and people before moving into Implementation. We are not ready to Plan an effort until we've passed Requirements. 

Resources (Teams and Team Members): Who is doing the work in Jira?

While it's a bit chicken-egg, determining who is doing the work is critical to determining scope. In a Plan, we connect Teams and Team Members to the Sources in the Plan. This eliminates the need for clicking or typing or trying to assign a piece of work to the correct Team in a Plan. By connecting these, Advanced Roadmaps for Jira will determine the scope for the Teams and Team Members based on the source of the Plan. You also have the ability to tie multiple Teams to a single source. As an example, if you have two Teams managing their work in a single Jira Project, you can use the Project as a source for both Teams. By adding Team Members to the Teams, you can guarantee assigned work will be directed to the correct Team. However, unassigned work will be divvied up based on the next Team Member's availability. We recommend creating a single source per Team if both Teams cannot be assigned each others' work. 

Moreover, by adding Team Members to your Teams, you can determine the hourly capacity of each member. We see this most frequently used when specific job functions are split across Teams (e.g. QA or Design). By default, Advanced Roadmaps for Jira calculates 100% capacity at 40 hours per Team Member. If you need to split capacity across Teams, simply adjust the Team Member's capacity to 20 hours (50%) on one Team and 20 hours (50%) on the other Team. By using the Auto Schedule function in a Plan, you can then recalculate the timeline based on the change in capacity. 

Time: When will it be done?

This is where the power of Advanced Roadmaps for Jira truly shines. By using Releases (aka Versions), the Plan can calculate your probability of completing the effort on time. The Plan can also calculate when an effort will be complete based on Scope and Teams. For example, if I estimate my effort will take 4000 hours and the Team has a capacity of 200 hours, it will take 20 weeks to complete the effort. If my Release finish date is in 10 weeks, I will be off track by 10 weeks. The Plan will highlight this in red. 

Don't think of Releases as traditional "software releases". Instead, these are milestone dates for a specific Jira Project or across multiple Jira Projects. They can be calendar quarters, fiscal quarters, or even a specific date-driven event. By designating the Finish Date of a Release, you are determining the amount of time the organization has to complete a specific (or the entire) scope of work. 

Dependencies and Scenarios

Critical Path is a common concept in a traditional WBS. These larger milestone issues drive the entire schedule. If one moves, the rest move as well. In Advanced Roadmaps for Jira, we can manage this via Dependencies. By linking issues together, the Plan will schedule work using a finish-to-start dependency. Issue 1 must be complete before Issue 2 can start. Moreover, since items at the lower levels of the WBS drive the size and duration of the critical path, you can visualize a schedule slip based on the progress of the lower levels. 

Not sure you're ready to commit to a specific Plan? When trying to understand the "What if?" in each Plan, you can enable Scenarios. The Initial Scenario (default name) is used to understand current state: what the are Teams currently working on, the progress, schedule, and release dates. Creating additional Scenarios allows you to Plan for best-case or worst-case scenarios. What happens if I add capacity to the current scope of work? Will I be more likely to hit my Release (aka milestone) dates? By adding a Team to a Scenario (thus increasing capacity), you can Auto Schedule just that Scenario to determine if there is any impact to the overall schedule and any milestone dates. If you like what you see, you can update Jira Software from that specific Scenario and any other Scenarios will update based on the underlying Jira data. 

Want to know more? 

As an Atlassian Platinum Enterprise Solution Partner, Praecipio Consulting can help you determine the best way to leverage Advanced Roadmaps for Jira to support your intake, planning, and execution processes so that your organization can become more Agile. We have extensive experience in the entire Atlassian product suite and implementing Agile frameworks that provide a great foundation for your organization or agency. 

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. 

Project Managers have a wide range of responsibilities when working on a project: they oversee planning the project, create a schedule and timeline, execute each phase, manage budgets, serve as the liaison among all stakeholders, and also troubleshoot and maintenance, plus whatever other tasks that get added to their plate. As such, a Project Manager (PM) must be very organized and detail oriented. They also need to have great people skills because at the end of the day, this person is responsible for leading the team and communicating with all involved parties.

The Project Management Institute describes the role of a project manager as someone who acts as an agent of change. Someone who “makes project goals their own and uses their skills and expertise to inspire a sense of shared purpose within the project team.”

PMs serve as leaders. Aside from ensuring the project is delivered on time and within the agreed-upon budget, they also encourage their teams and inspire their clients. They need to solve problems as they arise with strong critical-thinking capabilities while also possessing strong communication skills to ensure everyone remains informed, motivated, and onboard.

A good PM delivers a final product on time, on budget while meeting or exceeding client expectations. Tracing projects back to business goals is becoming increasingly necessary for project managers.

All brains on deck

The Agile framework focuses on self-organization and team empowerment rather than defining specific roles, which is why there is no need for a Project Manager in the traditional sense; the role is pretty much covered between all the existing roles.

Anyone who's ever taken an Agile class or training has heard of the defined roles of scrum master, product owner, and development team in the scrum framework, which makes no mention of the Project Manager role. Personally, I have taken five Agile classes from different places and never once have heard the word “Project Manager”. So, where does this skill set belong? Is there really no use for a PM in an Agile setting? Is there nothing they can do to add value to an Agile project?

An Agile organization can- and does- function well without a Project Manager. However, there is a huge potential for a PM skill set to add value to an organization, specifically on large projects. I have worked in QA Testing across various complex projects for the past five years, and it is clear to me that a PM can greatly impact both the journey and outcome of the project in regard to budget and risk management, as well as coordination between multiple scrum teams.

In an Agile environment, a Project Manager can add value by managing key aspects of every project, overseeing budgets, risks, etc., especially on large scale projects for enterprise organizations. Having a Project Manager also frees up the Scrum Master to focus solely on his or her core functions. 

Take, for example, the below chart from Ken Rubin and his article “What Happens to the Project Manager when Doing Agile Development with Scrum?”  While the PM role no longer exists in a traditional sense, you can see how the tasks and roles normally assigned to them still exist within the system, but are spread out throughout the team. As a result, the person who would normally act as the PM, can work very well as the Product Owner, the Scrum Master, or on the Development Team, depending on his or her background and specific skillset.

If you are looking to scale Agile principles within your organization, our team at Praecipio Consulting has you covered. Feel free to reach out to us with any questions!

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.