Ebooks

The Executive Playbook to Unleashing Your Business Strategy with Atlassian Focus

July 31, 2024

In today’s era of rapid change and escalating complexity, executives face a daunting challenge: bridging the gap between bold business strategy and real-world execution. Despite massive investments in technology and talent, most digital transformations still fail, costing organizations trillions in lost productivity. The data speaks for itself: a staggering 80% of digital transformations fail, and a mere 45% of employees truly understand what's expected of them, leading to an estimated $1.9 trillion in lost productivity.

This eBook, created by Atlassian and Praecipio, explores the root causes of these failures and offers practical solutions to finally bridge the gap between strategy and execution, ensuring sustainable success.

The definition of insanity

Repeating a Broken Business Strategy

Much like Rita Mae Brown’s often-misattributed quote about expecting different results, we tend to believe that repeatedly communicating the same ideas will eventually drive change within an organization. But the truth is, our internal conversations over the past decade have not evolved as much as we might assume.

As organizations increasingly shift to software and redefine themselves as tech companies that “happen to engage in the original business intent,” a critical gap remains: the connection between business strategy and execution. While executives and leaders provide the mission, vision, and values, they rely on a loose amalgamation of people, processes, and technology to execute those ideas.

But all hope is not lost. In fact, there are some compelling figures for organizations that can directly connect business strategy, goals, and work. According to Atlassian’s The State of Teams Report 2025 when teams align work to goals, they are:

6.4x more likely to produce high-quality work
2.2x more likely to focus their team on the work that matters most
4.9x more likely to meet deadlines

legit or Bullsh*t?

The Top 3 Reasons Strategy Execution Fails

Despite advancements in frameworks and technology designed to align teams with business strategy, organizations continue to rely on spreadsheets and face a persistent disconnect between strategy and execution. This divide manifests in three key ways:

1. Proliferations of Platforms

First, we know technology platforms that exist today are overly complicated and require teams of people to configure, maintain, govern, and operate. These platforms also proliferate across organizations, creating fragmented ecosystems. For instance, large enterprises rely on an average of 367 apps to get work done, and SaaS spending is projected to reach $723.4 billion by 2025, according to Gartner.

2. Distrust of Data

Second, executives want to make decisions, not waste time verifying data or whether they’re visualizing the data in a way that makes sense. Yet, more than half of executive leaders (52%) admit to discarding data presented to them because they don’t trust it. This lack of trust undermines decision-making and highlights the need for more reliable, transparent, and actionable data systems.

3. Lack of a Common Taxonomy

Business strategy often fails not due to a lack of ambition or funding but because organizations struggle to translate it into a shared operational framework. According to Gartner, 61% of corporate strategists cite poor strategy execution as the primary reason growth initiatives fail. This failure stems from issues like ambiguous responsibilities, misaligned objectives, and unclear priorities, all of which can be traced back to the absence of a common taxonomy that connects business strategy to execution data.

It should be easier

Are We On Track?

Organizations have made the shift to SaaS-based platforms like Atlassian Cloud largely because “it should be easier.” No longer managing the back-end infrastructure, your company was free to pursue more strategic endeavors with those people instead of competing for time and energy.

Fast-forward 12 months, and after considerable effort to move to SaaS-based platforms, you and your team are struggling to provide the ROI originally intended. Not only that, you and your team are managing an ever-growing backlog of items that may or may not connect to strategy. How often do you find yourself asking:

How Focus Solves This:

Focus simplifies the complexity. By integrating Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM), HRIS data, goals, and financial data into a single platform, it eliminates the need for constant management and upkeep. On top of this, most organizations can implement Focus in weeks, not months, freeing up already-strapped teams.

Focus provides the “forest instead of the trees,” offering leadership a high-level view of strategy execution without getting bogged down in operational minutiae.

stale data at best

Stop Leading With Last Week's Data

Most CIOs agree that automation is their biggest priority, but organizations continue to maintain antiquated (ahem, Excel) processes that provide stale data at best and wrong data at worst. If the data presented in a steering committee, ExComm, or board meeting is already outdated, how can leadership make effective decisions?

Executives want to make decisions quickly and confidently, not waste time questioning the accuracy or presentation of data.

How Focus Solves This:

Focus was purpose-built with the executive in mind. No one has 300,000 hours to spend on a monthly ExComm update. With Focus, you can consolidate connected data from across disciplines into a single, streamlined view.

By providing key insights into work and its alignment with goals, people, and costs, Focus enables executives to prioritize decisions based on strategic intent rather than just status updates. Value delivery is at the heart of Focus; being on time and on budget doesn’t mean anything if the effort doesn’t align with your organization’s mission, vision, and values.

dedicated vs disparate vs connected systems

The Data is There, You Just Can't See It

Executive leadership is responsible for defining the “What” and the “Why” of the organization’s long-term business strategy, ensuring it aligns with the mission, vision, and values. Meanwhile, VPs, Directors, and Portfolio Managers are tasked with figuring out the “How.” However, in high-trust organizations, this delegation often results in short-term strategy execution that lacks alignment with long-term goals.

This leads to a seemingly simple yet notoriously complex request from executives: “Map our investments, projects, and products to strategic outcomes in near-real-time, while providing what-if modeling to optimize for cost, value, or risk.” Yet, fewer than 20% of strategy visualizations effectively communicate strategic decisions, leaving executives frustrated and asking, “Why is this so hard when we have all this data?

How Focus Solves This:

Focus provides concise, actionable strategy visualizations that are easy for next-level leadership to consume. By aggregating data from Jira, Jira Align, Talent, and financial platforms, Focus enables bi-directional communication:

For Executives: A high-level view of progress toward strategic priorities.
For Next-Level Leadership: Context and direction to better understand and execute business strategy.

Unlike other platforms that demand strict adherence to rigid data taxonomies, Focus prioritizes flexibility. It doesn’t care about the data format; it cares about the connections between objects. Work and people are tied to Focus Areas and Goals, while financial data is pulled directly from your system of record. As long as work exists in Jira and/or Jira Align, status and progress are automatically updated.

As part of this commitment to flexibility, leadership can also create Views, which bring together slices of strategy. Whether it’s a series of smaller Sub-Focus Areas in the same hierarchy or multiple Focus Areas, Views allow you to quickly pivot strategy information either asynchronously or during a meeting.

Key Takeaway

Enjoy The View From The Top With Atlassian's Strategy Collection

Focus drives visibility, aligns strategy to outcomes, optimizes resources, tracks value, and supports modern delivery models, all while ensuring architectural governance and financial control. With its flexibility and speed of implementation, Focus ensures your organization delivers on business strategy without getting lost in the weeds.

At Praecipio, we ask our clients, “What’s blocking your view?” Through our VISTA approach—Visibility, Integration, Strategy, Technology, and Agility—we provide tailored solutions that drive meaningful business outcomes, helping you enjoy the view from the top. Focus, alongside the rest of the Strategy Collection, accelerates your climb by delivering a rapid return on value.

Since 2008, Praecipio has been dedicated to helping the world’s leading brands achieve their strategic priorities with better data, sharper decisions, and faster results. It’s why Atlassian partnered with us to collaborate on the design of Focus and Talent. Recently named Atlassian Partner of the Year for Enterprise Strategy and Planning, we’re ready to help your organization enhance visibility, streamline systems, and empower your teams to execute strategies that drive sustainable, long-term success.

Products - Atlassian Apps - Strategy Collection

WE ARE ON A MISSION TO

Build Connected Enterprises, One Organization at a Time.

At Praecipio, we don’t just deploy tools; we integrate them seamlessly, aligning your strategic vision and the teams executing it. We understand that tech’s true value lies in how it’s used—empowering, not complicating. We leverage our VISTA approach to dive into the heart of your business, aligning strategies, processes, and people. We’re the hands-on experts who get the right shit done, redefining how you work, not just the tools you use.

The Executive Playbook to Unleashing Your Business Strategy with Atlassian Focus

Repeating a Broken Business Strategy