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Why is a "Project" in Atlas called "Initiative" in Jira?

LG_aj2xtc

I wonder why would the Atlassian team allow the confusion:

- In Atlas, there are "Projects"

- But, in Jira, those are called "Initiatives"

Even worse, in Jira, a "Project" is a team or an entity (for the lack of a better word) that owns the "Initiatives" (aka "Projects" in Atlas).

This has already created a lot of confusion when talking to different stakeholders about a "project" (in my mind, I was talking about an "Atlas project", but for them it was confusing since they are all day in Jira, where a "project" is something completely different)....

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Samuel Gatica _ServiceRocket_

Hi @LG

Welcome to the community!

The terminology difference between Atlassian Atlas and Jira stems from their intended purposes and how they're structured:

Different Scopes & Focus

Atlas: It's crafted for cross-functional, high-level project tracking. A "Project" in Atlas is designed to highlight a broad, goal-driven effort that involves multiple teams or tools.
Jira: This tool is more about structured work execution. An "Initiative" in Jira Advanced Roadmaps represents a strategic theme or a significant body of work that brings together Epics.

Hierarchical Mapping

In Jira Advanced Roadmaps, you typically see the hierarchy as follows:
Initiative → Groups multiple Epics
Epic → Groups multiple Tasks/Stories
Task/Story → Individual work items
In Atlas, a "Project" is usually comparable to an Initiative in Jira since it signifies a long-term goal that spans various teams and Epics.

Cross-Team vs. Team Execution
Atlas Projects tend to be broader and keep track of the status of initiatives across multiple products, departments, or even organizations. On the flip side, Jira Initiatives are generally confined within a single Jira instance and focus more on execution.

Please check this doc for a further understanding of The relationship between Atlas and Jira

Best regards

Sam

LG_aj2xtc

thanks, Sam - for teams working with both products, and knowing that both were created by the same company (Atlassian), I am surprised by the terminology choice. It is confusing to call something as "project" in Atlas, and to have that same thing represented in Jira with the name of "initiative".

Haddon Fisher

This is a consistent (bu-dum CH) problem across Atlassian's product stack.

Jira using the term "project" to refer to what in Confluence would be called a "space" is already a constant low-level confusion. It encourages people who don't have a lot of experience with the tool to treat these as ad-hoc boxes for ad-hoc projects, which makes your instance a mess in about 30 seconds.

To use the exact same word in a tool that's ostensibly integrated with Jira to refer to something orthogonally different is not going to help people understand what this is supposed to be.

@Samuel Gatica _ServiceRocket_ I know you see a difference based on intention, but this to me is the real point here:

In Atlas, a "Project" is usually comparable to an Initiative in Jira since it signifies a long-term goal that spans various teams and Epics.

If these tools are meant to be used holistically, then things should be consistent across them.

David Nickell

Here is some practical advice (I hope) from someone who has been a ling time administrator (not an employee of Atlassian).

Consider Projects as Project Containers.
This year I've seen:
- Clients using Projects to Contain all the work by customer (This client did electrical engineering. They had several customer Projects).
- Similarly I had a client who manufactured kitchen equipment for their customers. They too had customer projects.
- Clients who use Projects to manage work by application. Look at jira.atlassian dot com sometime and you will see projects that pretty much align with their products by technology. This is common in software organizations I've been in.
- At the same time, clients can create Projects to manage the work of a team.

Here is the great thing -- you can do any combination of these approaches.

The double edged sword of the Atlassian data structure (20 years old I guess) is that it allows you to organize in a way that makes sense to YOU. It's all about tailoring the tool to your way of doing business, not forcing you into adopting someone's else vision of how work should be done.

The downside is how easy it can be to get confused and/or configure in a way that just confuses and frustrates everyone.

3 out of 4 clients I've worked with contacted me and said -- we set Jira up and have no idea what we're doing. I think Project Templates and Team Managed projects are an attempt to address the confusion. IMHO -- it's only made matters worse and even more confusing.

For whatever it was worth :-) .....

LG_aj2xtc

Thanks, I agree. The lack of consistency makes me wonder if Atlassian has a team of technical writers who keep naming consistency across different products. The current situation seems to tell they don’t

LG_aj2xtc

Thanks so much for your reply and insights! I’m glad you figured out a way of working around such a poor terminology schema by the Atlassian product team.

Haddon Fisher

Based on the output I've seen since Atlassian went public, I am not even sure they know there are other products, let alone talk to the people who make them.

Andy Heinzer

Hi everyone,

I understand that some users are confused at the usage of the term 'project' between Atlas and Jira. Being these products tend to serve different audiences, some terms could be used in another context to convey a slightly different meaning.

That said, change is always possible. For example Atlassian recently started to change the way we refer to 'issues' as instead referring to them as 'work items'. That one is still tripping me up almost daily, I have been using the term 'issues' for years. It can be a tricky habit to break.

I found these is an existing feature request within the Atlas bug tracking project to address this, see ATLAS-137

Should the Atlas team decide to make a change to this terminology, I would expect that 'work item' to be updated to reflect this.

Andy

LG_aj2xtc

Thanks, Andy -- it's more than a "confusion". It's frustration caused by a single company (Atlassian) deciding to use conflicting terminology across its products.

I disagree with your reasoning "these products tend to serve different audiences", at least in my Company's case. But even if you were right, imagine this (real case) conversation:

- Program manager: "hey, how is the project X going"

- Development manager: "there is no project called X in our Jira. What are you talking about"

- Product manager: "I think the Program manager is talking about the Atlas project, which appears as an initiative in Jira"

- Program manager: "Well, no, this is not an initiative, it's a project"

(go back to first answer by Dev. Manager and repeat)

It is not OK for teams on your customer side to even spend 10 seconds on a BS conversation like this, trying to fix, mentally, what someone at Atlassian thought was a good terminology choice.

Saying this without anger, but frustrated and with the feeling that I have to explain something obvious, that this is *not* on the customer side to "better understand how our products work", and that the Atlassian team is unable to recognize they created this problem.

Dirk Lachowski_b0vz9b

I disagree with your reasoning "these products tend to serve different audiences", at least in my Company's case.

Exactly! Since Atlas is a part of the platform experience, we started to adopt it and one of the first really frustrating outcomes was the need to qualify what type of project we’re talking about. Now we have to say „Atlas project“ (with the added problem that Atlas isn’t even a product anymore, making future justification of that name difficult) and „Jira project“. This is an easy way to just abandon Atlas at all, because this is so weired. On top of that, I have ongoing discussions about why people are supposed to not to talk about tasks in Atlas: „But, but - it‘s projects“. This is just bad interface design.

Nicola Sun

Hi everyone, Nicola from the Product team here.

Thank you for sharing your frustrations - we acknowledge the Projects terminology is confusing and duplicative across multiple products and that this makes for an extremely frustrating experience.

Addressing the terminology overlap and impact on experience is one of our top priorities at Atlassian. We are working to provide clearer information for our customers and look forward to sharing more with you soon.

LG_aj2xtc

Thanks, @Nicola Sun , for the honest and vulnerable/accountable answer.

Do you have an ETA for when the terminology will be fixed?

Nicola Sun

We are committed to carefully considering any changes to ensure minimal impact on your everyday experience with our products.

At this time, we need more time to work through our plans and don't have an ETA for completion. We do value your input though and would love to hear your feedback as we move forward.

If you're interested in providing feedback, let me know and I can reach out when there's a suitable opportunity for collaboration.

Thanks!

Haddon Fisher

Hey Andy Heinzer - It's funny that you bring up the "`issue` to `work`" topic, because this is sort of the same issue in a different expression.

I am absolutely not intending to nitpick something you said, and none of this is personal, but I do think "...these products tend to serve different audiences" sort of hits the nail on the head.

Atlassian has fairly quickly done a 180 from "we optimize for flexibility and ease-of-use so as many teams as possible can use them effectively and get spun up quickly" to having some very specific ideas about how their tools "should" be used. Unfortunately, it also feels like a lot of those opinions preclude a lot of how customers actually use them. Deciding that overlapping terminology is OK because "they're different audiences" and changing "issue" to "work" are big ones, but there's a slew of others getting as specific as "you can only have one Agile board connected to a team-managed project". And don't get me going on the new UI All of these things, implicit or explicit, force us to adjust people and processes to fit tooling instead of the other way around (i.e. how this is supposed to work).

The level of Atlassian engagement with it's customers has absolutely skyrocketed in the last 5 years, and I really really really love it. And....it just really doesn't feel like a lot of that feedback is being internalized. If anything, it feels like it's being cherrypicked to support a pretty specific and pre-determined outcome, and anything contrary is dismissed.

Dennis Stengele

One thing I don't get about this: If Projects in Atlas and Initiatives in Advanced Roadmaps are basically the same, why can Atlas projects only be synced with Epics? (https://support.atlassian.com/jira-software-cloud/docs/link-work-in-jira-to-goals-and-projects-in-atlassian-home/#How-to-link-projects-to-work-in-Jira)

Especially only one Epic. That feels like it is the wrong level, since if you use Roadmaps, your global business projects would be Initiatives.

LG_aj2xtc

@Dennis Stengele on my "home" (aka "Atlas"), I get a section "Where is the work tracked?" that is linked to an *initiative*, not to an "epic" (once I go to the initiative there are epics there, as children). Maybe I am not understanding your comment - which, given the mess the Atlassian team has created between Jira, Atlassian, ..., would not surprise me

Dennis Stengele

Yes, you can add a normal link to the Initiative this way, but this is then not synchronized with each other like it happens for Epics.

I actually found a way to do it though: If you have the Project panel enabled in Jira, you can use that in the Initiative to link to an existing Atlas project or create a new one: Screenshot 2025-04-22 093639.png

LG_aj2xtc

A couple of months have passed, so I thought I'd ask if there's an ETA for fixing this. @Nicola Sun any news? Thanks

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