Jira Project and Atlas Project

Anders Hebert

Probably a very basic and silly question to ask, but I have just activated Atlas (free version) and wish to work more integrated with our Jira Software and Confluence set-up. So I am setting up Atlas and just can't seem to get my head around what is called a "project" in Jira is not a "project" in Atlas.

Do I have to create a separate project in Atlas? Can't I just connect Jira and Atlas so the projects in Jira become visible in Atlas? I only seem to be able to get Jira Epics to work as "projects" in Atlas. Which makes no sense to me. 

I have connected our Jira and Atlas, to such an extent that I can search Jira Epics in Atlas. In Jira the "Goals" appear in the left-hand menu and in tasks that I can connect to Goals that I have set up in Atlas.

Another question is: can I create Key Results (or metrics) to the Goals I set up (in the free Atlas version)?

Walter Buggenhout

Hi @Anders Hebert,

In many cases, projects in Jira are even hard to align with a project in the real world. Think of a project in Atlas as a (business or IT) initiative that you want to report health an progress on at regular intervals. Projects in Jira are basically containers for work, having a common context. That context might be a project, a product, a customer, a team or anything else that makes sense. 

Assuming that you have some sort of definition in place for a project in your company, the idea is that each one matching the definition has a single entry in Atlas. Then define:

• what you want to achieve
• why you want to achieve it
• when you would consider yourself successful
• who's gonna work on it
• when you plan to deliver

From that point onwards, the project owner will receive an automated weekly reminder to provide a short status update (RAG status and short comment), ensuring you don't have to chase people around for this and keep a high level, humanly curated overview of your entire project portfolio.

Because more often than not projects in Jira do not match business projects, see them as different things. They can't be connected.

Linking projects to Epics is meant to connect the actual work in Jira to Atlas. Not with the idea to be able to track status of all the work items, but to find where the work is happening from the one pager in Atlas. I feel too that just being able to connect Epics is not necessarily the right connection - for users on a premium plan, being able to connect work from higher level in the hierarchy would make a lot more sense. I would suspect that this is something that will evolve, but as mentioned - only from the premium plan users can leverage the hierarchy above epics - in the standard and free plans of Jira, epics are as high as you can go.

When it comes to goals, you can add sub-goals to goals. While they are still "goals" by name, they are listed below their parent goal and can be used to represent key results. In the free plan, you can track them by status as you can do with projects. Goal scoring (with metrics) is a feature of the standard plan.

Hope this helps!