Introduction to Jira Align
For any enterprise organisation that aims to keep growing and stay on top, agility is business-critical. To achieve it, knowledge has to flow seamlessly, and connect the execution and delivery of work all the way up to the strategy and goals set by leadership teams.
Enter Jira Align from Atlassian, a powerful cloud-based tool that connects information from the team level all the way through to the C-suite.
Meet Align
Jira Align (formerly known as AgileCraft) was acquired by Atlassian in early 2019. It's a cloud-based product that connects securely to one or more instances of Jira (of any flavour: Cloud, Server, or Data Center) to give insight into the state of play for all of the teams in an enterprise-level organisation.
Alignment, all the way around
Align's big value add is its ability to roll up information from team level agile activity into program or portfolio views—and ultimately connect this all more directly to the delivery of value to customers. Designed from a product development point of view, it allows road-mapping to happen at a high level while communicating the strategic goals and objectives to the teams doing the work.
Jira Align rounds out a robust feature set with tools for business model canvassing, ideation, and long-term goal tracking. There is even clever functionality for visualising dependencies across teams and their work. And with customisable data objects, Align can be tailored to support any of the major frameworks for running Agile at scale such as SAFe®, Disciplined Agile, Scrum@Scale, and more.
If you're juggling multiple agile teams and developing a portfolio of products—and what enterprise practicing Agile at scale isn't?—Jira Align can help bring a new level of transparency to key stakeholders while ensuring that no piece of the value stream is left out.
Who can benefit from Jira Align?
- Organisations utilising a scaled agile framework such as SAFe®, DAD, Scrum@Scale, LeSS, Spotify, etc
- Executive teams connecting strategic goals and objectives through to the team level
- Program managers tracking roadmaps, risks, and dependencies at a feature level
- Organisations with multiple instances of Jira used by different business units
Align me up
Adaptavist was one of the first Atlassian partners to be hands-on with Jira Align following the acquisition. Due to our unique experience helping clients with scaled agile initiatives such as SAFe®, Adaptavist has been able to work closely with the Align team, ensuring that we're able to implement and support the tool for all sizes of enterprise.
Want to know more about how Jira Align can support your efforts to scale agile?
About the authors: Vinesha D'Mello is an experienced Transformation Consultant, trainer, and agile expert who works with technical and non-technical teams to coach them on best practices, transform their processes, adapt to change, and scale. Vinesha believes in approaching customer engagements in a pragmatic way, and she collaborates with clients to identify their needs, prioritise them, and design solutions that enable them to accelerate transformation through processes, tools, and people. Vinesha has over 10 years of diverse experience in IT, and she's a certified SAFe Program Consultant (SPC).
Rizwan Hasan: Rizwan Hasan is a Senior Transformation consultant, who works with agile teams and enterprise organisations to understand, strategise, and ultimately deliver on large scale transformation projects. Rizwan is a certified SAFe 5.0 Program Consultant (SPC), with a decade of experience supporting and coaching teams on agile adoption and Lean transformation projects. Rizwan is passionate about applying principles of agile to help teams achieve better ways of working.
