Dominic Price Atlassian Team

LESS' strength is that it’s lightweight on purpose. Typically teams may go from a single scrum team to a ‘scrum of scrums’ (maybe 3 teams) and then to LeSS. So it provides all the same rituals of scrum, just at scale, which is also good if those practices are already familiar to a team.

Some of the pros of using Portfolio for Jira include the ability to: * Build a roadmap that's connected to your work in Jira Software. * Get better visibility of work happening across teams and projects * Get an overview of dependencies across teams and projects * Add additional levels of hierarchy above epics. * Get a…

I do love day dreaming about the future workplace and what it might be like. I don't really have any predictions, but there are some trends that fascinate me. * I believe we'll see more companies embracing the power of tech and enabling true remote and distributed teams. * More flexibility in working hours through…

Mikey. I think we can have as much impact as we believe we can have. Cheesy I know, but think about it as having two options. Option 1, you do nothing. It wont improve and you don't learn good habits. Option 2: You do something, and it might improve, and you'll definitely learn something. I used to suggest that it was the…

Hey Louis, unfortunately we can't disclose our future roadmap as we are now a public company. Check out Jira.atlassian.com for a live repository of all customer requests. 

You really know how to make a bloke blush, Billy! As far as Atlassian swag goes, there's an app, well website, for that! https://atlassian-swag.mybrightsites.com/products?s%5Bf%5D%5Bc%5D%5B%5D=%2FApparel

Hey LeKisha lots of good questions in here. As an advocate of agile, how can one effectively outline and articulate the benefits of agile even for teams (e.g., Infrastructure) who claim they will forever be waterfall? I'm going to tap into my years as a management consultant to answer this question, the key to convincing…

People say the same thing about roadmaps and a part of me agrees completely. Another part of me has seen the value of a roadmap to help communicate a possible scenario for the delivery of a product to those that otherwise wouldn't understand. The same is likely true in this capacity planning discussion. I'd encourage you…

We have heard this feedback a lot, and is a reason we built a new project type in our Cloud offering. Scrum and Kanban are great for teams with mature processes and clearly defined roles and responsibilities. But we also realize that not all teams have that all figured out yet. So we recently created a more flexible, yet…

You're not alone Callum. It sounds like you're well on your way to agility! You should pat yourself on the back for holding the ceremonies and structuring your development teams as you do. This is quite a common dilemma, and I see how your org structure impacts your ability to feel truly agile. My hunch is you'd have the…

Hey Fabienne. What I find is most important to a team's agile journey, is starting off on the right foot, by setting up a time to introduce everyone to the principles of agile. Even a quick Google search of the "agile manifesto" will help your team grasp what your North Star is as you make the process your own. I think…

One myth holding people back is the idea that agile is only for software teams. Not only is this patently untrue (HR, Marketing, Design... all these disciplines can benefit from iterative planning and execution!), it's creating friction within organizations. If your software team wants to work in an agile way, but your…

Thanks Kat Yep, sure can. That's often the situation with cross-functional teams (e.g., 2 developers, 1 designer, 1 marketer). I recommend putting everyone's work items into the same backlog so it's all collected in one place and you're all looking at a single source of truth. During spring planning, just be mindful of how…

As a start, whiteboards are a great way of bringing a scrum or kanban practice into your building. When you start standing around a whiteboard, you end up having conversations about how your team is working that you probably never had before. Jira's Scrum and Kanban boards are great for more mature teams with agreed upon…

I love this question. THANK YOU for asking it. You can't run a top-down psychological safety initiative. It just doesn't work that way. Instead, we work to make sure individuals are contributing to a culture of safety in a few key ways. First, we embrace honest failures as a learning experience. Nobody has ever been fired…

I'll be honest, mate: hardware or component development is not my area of expertise. However, have you looked into a practice called "concurrent engineering"? Again, I'm no expert, but it appears to be a framework for developing physical components in parallel with the software that controls them. Curious to hear whether…

Yes! Tools can absolutely get in the way! I like to say that "a fool with a tool is still a fool... but now they're able to be foolish much more efficiently" Look: tools aren't worth a damn unless they're supporting effective collaboration practices. If your planning and prioritization practices are crap, and you buy Jira,…

Thanks Brant. It's all about evolution instead of revolution. Here's yet another place where the Team Health Monitor can help. It gets teams into the habit of reflecting, assessing, and improving regularly. Making the mental shift from valuing perfection to valuing progress is massively important for teams transitioning to…

Prioritizing work is a dark-arts melange of customer value, business value, and urgency. Atlassian starts by setting high-level objectives for a year that the whole company is going to work toward. From there, each department or team decomposes that into quarterly goals for themselves. And from there, we can prioritize the…

To nail the basics, an agile coaches should have a thorough understanding of agile practices, tools and processes. They should have experience in building, operating and improving agile teams and a deep understanding of agile methodologies. The best agile coaches I've seen guide teams through the why, what, when, and how…

Questions like:- * Are you shipping value frequently? * Is that frequency improving? * Are you using frequent feedback loops to continually improve your product? * Are you using frequent feedback loops to continually improve your process? * Are your people becoming more cross-functional? * Are your people engaged? * Are…

My old mate Danny. Great question, and tough one to answer without knowing more. Maybe I need to come visit! Some of the best insights and lessons I've learnt about inter-dependent multi team projects, is from the book Team of Teams, which is a great read. The way we've practiced that internally at Atlassian, is through…

I think the frustration is sometimes that you're following the rituals, but not seeing the results. In my experience, that is often caused by not realising the real outcome of the ritual. EG: I've seen teams religiously complete retro's, but get frustrated, that is because the same things are coming up every time. They…

Identifying and articulating a team's pain points is exactly why we developed the Team Health Monitor. In a Health Monitor workshop, you'll walk through 8 attributes of healthy, high-performing team and assess where your team is at. Now, full disclosure: will the Heath Monitor reveal why your continuous delivery pipeline…

A topic which has much debate Carlos. Agile and agility are likely to remain useful for the foreseeable future, especially when you look at tech change, AI/Robotics, increased competition, innovation, war for talent, and borderless business. As I mentioned in the question about the Agile Manifesto, what's next is for teams…

Thanks Bryan. Meet the people where they are and help them solve the problems they have using agile behaviours and practices. Accept that agile might be 'an' answer, but not 'the' answer, and that there may be other methods of working that make teams effective. One major pitfall I've seen, is that companies forget to…

We have an incredible Marketplace of apps (https://marketplace.atlassian.com/addons/app/jira), and the "best" app really depends on your needs. WIth that said, here are the apps that I have used and loved with Jira: Tempo timesheets, ScriptRunner for Jira, JSU - Suite Utilities for Jira, Jira Misc Workflow Extensions, and…

I've had a look at Holacracy website a few times, and I'm fascinated by some of the concepts, but I'll admit, I've never truly tried to follow it. Based on the #retroonagile we ran in our booth this week, there is no doubt room for growth with Agile, but also an overwhelming amount of happy, devoted Agile adopters. 

The right board for tracking work is the board that members of YOUR team will keep up-to-date. Some teams are really into physical boards where you move index cards from column to column. It's tangible, it's satisfying, it's easy. It's also completely unsuitable for distributed teams and it lacks a paper trail, so it's not…

That's pretty much what the Team Health Monitor is tailor-made to do. By asking questions like "Do we have the right balance of skills and experience on our team?", you're identifying the areas most in need of improvement. And by identifying follow-up actions and checking in regularly, you put the "continuous" in…