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🎯 Who wants to try our new goal linking feature for Jira Software?

Daniella Latham

We’ve received a lot of feedback from users who want to see how work in Jira Software connects to Atlas goals, so teams can stay aligned.

We’re excited to take the first step in this journey, and want to know what you think!

Through our Atlas for Jira Cloud app, goals associated with projects that have been connected to Jira epics will be automatically linked, and visible right from the epic page.

How to try it:

1. Download the Atlas for Jira Cloud app.

2. Find or create a Jira epic, and connect with the relevant project in Atlas, by adding it to the “Where is work tracked” field, and opting to sync it.

3. Ensure the project is linked to a goal.

4. Head over to the Jira epic page, and check out the linked goal from the goal section. You may need to refresh the page first.

Any goals you add to your contributing Atlas project will automatically be synced on an ongoing basis to your Jira Software epic, so your teams will always be kept up to date on the outcomes of their work.

Linked Atlas goals JSW.png

⚠️ Known limitations:
Currently, you can link only Jira epic issues to Atlas projects. We’re looking to support more in the future, so feel free to share what you use, and what the ideal state would be like for you.

✨ More guides and resources:

Coming soon

This is just the first step! Our team is currently working hard on enabling the ability to link an Atlas Goal directly to a Jira Software epic. We’re just so excited about empowering your teams to know the outcomes their work contributes to, that we didn’t want to keep this away from you any longer. Stay tuned for what’s coming soon with goals in Jira!

Let us know what you think!

Comments

crouhana

Love the feature! We started using it right after team 23.

Small feedback, for some users, the app keeps asking for "storage permission" and "authorization". Once you click on authorization, the app widget reloads with no problem, until you refresh your browser.

Dan W_kamf5a

Ideally we would like to be able to link to initiatives, stories and bugs.

Initiatives to projects

epics to goals

stories/bugs to sub-goals

How are others drawing those lines between the work in Jira and updates in Atlas?

Matthew McGarity_rhrce6

This seems promising, but it doesn't work in our environment. I see the section for "Linked Goals", but its content is empty and shows a never-ending loading spinner.

crouhana

I wouldn't link stories and bugs. Atlas is for upper management communication. You don't want to report every single thing.

For the kind of reporting you're asking for, i would use Advanced Roadmaps / Plans.

Joe Pursel_943fmb

I started using this feature today by syncing an Atlas project with a Jira Software Cloud project Epic. As stated above, I was asked about storage and confirmed my choice.

The significance of this feature is that it provides Atlas project information in the Epic, showing the last Update and what the project is about. While in the Atlas Project, the Epic appears under the Where is this work tracked?

All users who view the Epic now see the latest information about the Atlas project, and it will be a great timesaver to switch between the two quickly.

Excellent work, Team!

I am looking forward to linking an Epic to a Goal.

Doug_fmch8l

Thanks for this feature! I am very excited about it!

I might not be right about this, but at the moment it seems to only allow 1 Epic to be associated with each Goal.

If that is correct, I'm curious if that is that an intentional constraint or would it be possible to consider goals as large enough to potentially be supported by multiple epics?

I'm imagining:

Goal
1. Project A
  1. Epic A.1
  2. Epic A.2
  3. Epic A.3
2. Project B
  1. Epic B.1
  2. Epic B.2

^ but I'm not sure if that is the way I should be thinking about it!

Andrew Hammond

This is unfortunately a browser limitation with the current implementation, we're in the early days of exploring ways to improve this and potentially remove the storage permission step required for end users.

A temporary work around would be to always allow third party cookies for team.atlassian.com in your browser settings.

Andrew Hammond

Hey @Matthew McGarity could you please raise a support request so we can look into this more for you?

Rachel Lin

Hey Doug! That's not quite correct. An Epic can be synced to only 1 Atlas project, but can be linked to many goals.

In your case, if you had 2 goals that projects were contributing to, it might look like:

Goal A

- Project A <-> Epic 1

- Project B <-> Epic 2

Goal B

- Project A <-> Epic 1

- Project C <-> Epic 3

Hope that helps

Rachel Lin

+1 to @crouhana - I think the question here is, do you need to communicate to outside stakeholders (leadership OR dependent teams) on the weekly progress of a story or a bug?

In terms of initiatives, this is on our radar to support more issue types than just epics.

Doug_fmch8l

Thanks for the quick reply, Rachel! I think the challenge I'm facing is that, thus far, we have been putting a link to a Jira board in the "Where is work tracked?" field. The idea being that there is (usually) a Jira board associated with each project in Atlas, and so, all the Epics, issues, etc, on the board are related to that project.

It looks like at the moment for this feature to work, I need to put a single Epic in the field. I'm unable to add more than one link to the field on the Atlas side, and on the Jira side, if I try to add more than one Epic, each subsequent Epic replaces the previous one.

All that said - I recognize I may not be using this as intended. Grateful for suggestions and advice!

Erki Tammik

@Daniella Latham

I haven't checked Atlas for a couple of months now, so something might have changed.
We haven't started using Atlas because it requires too much manual work to keep everything up to date.

Problem starts from here:

Epics are generally fine, but if you have a lot of them, it doesn't work very well.

It would be great to have an option to include "Initiative" level issues and include "Epics" as projects/tasks beneath them. It would be nice if there was a way to include Initiatives using JQL because doing it one by one is too time-consuming. Syncing these with JQL would give us an option to keep everything up to date easily.

This way, if someone needs an overview, they can check the Initiatives and drill down to the Epics to see how everything is progressing, there should be a indicator see progress of Epics and Initiatives.

We are using a third-party tool that offers some of the features that Atlas currently lacks.

@Doug came up with a good idea.

Goal

Project A
1. Epic A.1
2. Epic A.2
3. Epic A.3

"Project A" could be a Initiative that has projects beneath them.

Dan W_kamf5a

I have a need for both really, I have one set of stakeholders that is only interested in the initiative and epic level but another set that is impacted at the story level. Initiative/Epic will work for a large majority of our use cases I believe.

Daniella Latham

Thank you for the feedback, @Erki Tammik.

As shared above, we're looking at making linking more flexible beyond just epics.

If you're comfortable, could you share which tool you're also using?

Matthew McGarity_rhrce6

@Andrew Hammond Sure! I actually appended it to an existing ticket in your service desk.

Joe Pursel_943fmb

Another benefit of linking Atlas Projects to Jira Epics is seeing the Atlas Projects Goals in the Epic.

The Goals connected to an Atlas Project appear in the Epic under Linked Issues as Linked Goals and Goals are synced from work you have connected from Atlas.

If the Epic is linked to an Atlas Project and that project has Goals attached to it, you may see an image of a lock requesting that you Authorize to view the Goals listed in the Epic. Once the Authorization is complete, the Goals will appear.

The screenshot below shows an Atlas Project Goal with its Status, Due Date, and image of the Goal Owner in the Epic. If you have multiple Goals connected to the Atlas Project, these will also be shown under the Epics Linked Goals as below.

Linked Atlas Project Goals in a Jira Epic.png

Thanks, Atlassian Team, for this new feature!

Chad Parker

@Daniella Latham

I am also looking to link projects to other issue types in the hierarchy that we use in Jira. I think this is a great start, but I would also like the following:

Allow linking to other issue types higher in the issue type hierarchy in jira
Allow for just linking and not syncing. I would like to see goals and atlas status' without having to sync everything between them, especially name.
Allow linking to multiple epics.

Daniella Latham

@Doug it sounds like flexible issue mapping might be a solution for your needs - i.e. linking one level above a Jira epic to your Atlas project. That way all the relevant epics would roll up under that.

We're not there but it's in our plans!

Does that make sense?

Daniella Latham

Hey @Chad Parker

Thanks so much for sharing! Re your points:

2) Do you mean syncing the name of the Atlas project and Jira epic?

3) would this be solved by allowing linking higher issue types (e.g. initiatives) than epics - as you will be able to see how epics roll up under that?

Reg Meyer

Do you have any plans to link this to Discovery?

crouhana

please and thank you! I'd pay for this.

Andrew Hammond

This is indeed a capability that is on the teams radar, watch this space 👀

We'll be sure to announce as soon as a v1 of an integration with JPD is ready for general use!

David Washburn_434ooi

Question about the Marketplace app. I installed it and immediately noticed the new Status updates section appear on the sidebar of my Jira issues. Does that appear for everyone in the company, or only uses assigned to Atlas? Because my company doesn't know about Atlas yet as we're still introducing it.

I don't want to enable this feature if it's going to suddenly appear on everyone's Jira projects on the sidebar of an issue. Screenshot 2023-05-11 at 10.50.50 AM.png

Dan W_kamf5a

I just confirmed it is available for everyone after it is installed. I am only seeing it on Epics.

Mia Paulin

@Daniella Latham

I think its great and I've created an instance it. I just haven't linked my bitbucket, compass and Tello to it yet. I've been trying to design my server implementation, but will be more proactive in keeping my progress in my Jira and confluence instances.doI apologize. Grabbing a bite to eat and will be back bery shortly. Thanks for your patience and understanding! You guys are awesome!

David Washburn_434ooi

Thanks for the feedback @Dan W. I am glad to know it's Epics only, but this does make it tricky to prepare when most of the company doesn't use Atlas or know about it. Or some users may not have a license assigned and wonder what the product is.

Daniella Latham

@Reg Meyer @crouhana would love to know more about why you'd find this useful?

James Lester

@Andrew Hammond I'm sure by now you're aware of this, but Edge does not keep the authorization even with third-party cookie blocking turned off. Any workaround at this time?

Matthew McGarity_rhrce6

Following-up on this — it's working now!

Matthew McGarity_rhrce6

> Currently, you can link only Jira epic issues to Atlas projects. We’re looking to support more in the future, so feel free to share what you use, and what the ideal state would be like for you.

One our end, we currently have one Atlas Goal per software release, and under that an Atlas Project for each major feature within that release. Those same features correspond to Jira Epics, so the sync works well.

However, there are occasions when the business has requested visibility to work that doesn't fit into that model — specifically individual stories which don't rise to the level of needing a parent Epic.

Because Atlas doesn't (yet, maybe) sync Projects → Stories, we work around this by moving such individual stories to their own private epic, but I think it could be easier if we could link Projects down one level — specifically to the Story type, which would be helpful on those rare occasions.

Rachel Lin

Hey Matt, HIGHLY encourage you to drop in some time so we can catch up more. Loving your feedback and energy around Atlas!

https://calendly.com/rlin2/atlas-jira-goal-exploration-research

Ben McCormick_edqah9

@Andrew Hammond I'm also unable to get this working on the latest chrome no matter what cookie settings I choose. Possibly there's a setting from my employer that I can't override, but I've explicitly allowed third party cookies for <my-org>.atlassian.net and team.atlassian.com and have had no luck.

Konstantin Konstantinov Boyanov

Just found this product yesterday, and it really nicely fits into our KPO initiative, acting as an umbrela for all epics in different projects.

Jacques Papper

When working towards a goal which spans multiple projects, it would be great to be able to link issues directly to goals. I see goals like cross-project epics. Sometimes you have a bug in one projects which is impeding progress towards a goal, however, having to create an epic inside a project for a single bug for example is non-sense.

Any suggestions ?

Adam Mizrahi_maufne

Hi. Really want to use atlas, have everything going well. But we need lower level granularity, aka, linking issues as well as epics to goals. This is super limiting for the one off small tasks that make up a goal. Not every contributing task from different teams is worthy of an epic.

i also find the limitation of one epic per project super limiting, so we just forego using projects.

Michelle Herschell

@Daniella Latham

Hello! Really excited to use this feature. I am noticing that I can only link a sub-goal to one parent goal, is there a way to link a sub-goal to multiple parent goals?

For example, at our company we have multiple OKRs we're trying to reach. The sub-goals are the metrics we're trying to improve, and we want to link those metrics to multiple OKRs (parent goals).

Thanks!

Martin Vali_aexsqj

Is atlas only linked to software projects?

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