Changes to Goals & Projects - including features available with Strategy Collection

[#1]

Hi Goals and Projects Community 👋

I've got some updates - and a heads-up - about what's ahead for Goals and Projects.

For many teams, Goals and Projects make it easy to track progress and stay connected to shared priorities. But some customers are managing goals at a scale that demands more - hundreds of goals across multiple teams, portfolios, regions, and planning cycles. That's where Strategy Collection comes in. It helps leaders see how work maps to strategy, allocate people and funding to the right priorities, and course-correct in real time.

To meet that need, we're building new capabilities for enterprise governance and cross-portfolio coordination. The first, managing app permissions at the group level, will be available with a Strategy Collection license starting in late August.

We'll continue to invest in Goals and Projects for all customers, and the core Goals and Projects experience will remain the same.

Here's a look at what's landed recently and what's rolling out in the coming weeks.

What’s new and what’s next

Available now for everyone

• Start with the goals you care about: Set a saved view as your personal default in the Goals Directory, so you skip the repeat filtering and land on the right goals every time.

• Find the goals that need your attention: Filter for score, target date, last updated, and goal type to quickly surface what matters.

• See goals in context: Goals in Jira Plans are now interactive Smart Links. Hover to preview status and latest updates, or click to open full details.

• Track changes to goals: See a chronological log of important changes made to your goals, such as who changed a target date, archived a goal, or made updates, so you always know what changed and who changed it.

• Roll-up goal progress the way you actually work: Choose whether a goal's progress rolls up from its success measures or from its sub-goals, so your tracking matches how your hierarchy is structured.

• Link work in Jira directly to Projects: Create a clear line of sight between projects and the work that delivers them.

Coming soon for everyone

• Restrict who can view and edit goals: Control who can view and edit individual goals, so you can plan confidently for sensitive objectives, early-stage strategy, or goals that aren’t ready to share broadly yet. (August)

Coming soon for Strategy Collection

• Manage app permissions at the group level: Simplify governance and permission management at scale with centralized control over user permissions across Goals and Projects. (late August)

• Monthly metric targets: Set month-by-month targets for goal metrics and compare them with actual results, helping inform status and spot progress trends earlier. (September)

There's a lot more coming to help you connect work to the outcomes that matter most. We’ll keep you posted here in the community as new features become available.

Curious about Strategy Collection?

Watch the demo to see how Strategy Collection works or explore use cases to see how teams are using it to plan, prioritize and deliver across portfolios.

Frequently asked questions

Does my Goals and Projects experience change if I don’t have Strategy Collection?

No. Nothing is being removed from your current Goals and Projects experience.

Will all future Goals and Projects capabilities require a Strategy Collection license?

No. We will continue to launch features to improve Goals and Projects for all customers. However, if there are features that require a Strategy Collection license, we will explicitly call it out when launching those features and add them to the Goals and Projects capabilities in Strategy Collection support guide.

What determines if a capability requires a Strategy Collection license?

Features designed for enterprise governance and cross-portfolio coordination - for example, managing app permissions at the group level, will require a Strategy Collection license.

What if my organization already has Strategy Collection?

If your organization has a Strategy Collection license, all users on the site automatically get access to all Goals and Projects features as they roll out.

How do I know if I have Strategy Collection?

Check with your Atlassian admin, or via Atlassian apps in Atlassian Administration. 

How do I get Strategy Collection?

Talk with your account team to see if Strategy Collection is right for your organization.

[zoltanersek _outpostlabs_dev_]

I like the direction Atlassian is taking with treating the knowledge base as the foundation for AI rather than as a standalone documentation repository.

[AMIN EL]

We wish to rely on the Goals and Projects apps provided with Jira Enterprise first for general use. As a pre cursor. What is your best advice on rolling out those two apps first inside an org ? Could advanced planner as well be of a help. and Why is it that only one Jira work item can be connected to a Project ? Yet goals accept multiple work items using Links copy paste ?

[Charlie Marriott]

Hi @AMIN EL thanks for your message!

Rolling out Goals and Projects

The way to think about these different apps is that Jira is where the work gets tracked in detail; Projects is where that work gets communicated outward to other teams and stakeholders; and Goals represent the outcome the work is trying to achieve.

A few things to try:

• Pilot with a smaller team first. Pick one or two teams that already communicate well to shake out the process before you go org-wide. They'll surface the questions everyone else will have and become your internal champions.
• Use it to replace status meetings. This is where the cultural shift lands - if a Project update captures status, blockers, and what's next, recurring status meetings become read-and-comment instead of sit-and-listen. We find that "fewer meetings, async updates" is something teams like to get behind!
• Migrate what you're already tracking elsewhere. If your goals live in spreadsheets, decks, or Confluence pages, move them across as part of the rollout - that's when they go from static docs to living, owned, status-tracked items connected to the work. If there's a lot scattered around, do it as one deliberate batch (inventory, assign an owner and cadence, bring them over together) rather than letting them trickle across.
• Anchor the kickoff to a natural planning moment. A new financial year or quarter is ideal - people are already goal-setting and re-planning, so adoption rides that wave instead of asking teams to change process mid-cycle.

Why one work item per Project, but many links on Goals?

Great catch - the good news is that this is exactly the limitation Atlassian has just removed. 

A new Project field on Jira work items lets you connect any work item to an Atlassian Project, regardless of work item type or which space it lives in. You can connect multiple work items to the same Project, and child work items automatically inherit the Project form their parent, so you’re not tagging everything by hand.

So a Project can now represent the full picture of work across your teams, not just one epic. The Project field also works with JQL, inline editing, and grouping in List/Board views. To turn it on, an admin adds the Atlassian Project field to work items per space (a one-time setup per space; Projects itself is org-scoped), and you can also connect work items straight from the Projects app. Changes stay in sync both ways.

I hope that helps!