Rob Phillips Atlassian Team

It was nice to see SAFe acknowledge the broader use of OKR's beyond Theme level with the recent 6.0 framework release. As interest continues to grow toward measuring the Outcomes ("did I build the right thing?"" to complement the longtime work execution focus ("did I build it right?"), sometimes clients are unclear on what…

Back in the "old days", one of the first things we ever did on day 1 of Jira Align user training was ensure that users logged in and set their Edit Preferences settings immediately. This is an easy step that seems like minimal impact, but over time (and now especially with remote learning limitations) I've run into…

INTRODUCTION As Agile ways of working emerged, companies have struggled over the years with Agile Forecasting. The evolution from the waterfall PMO world of estimating Projects into a reasonable "will it fit?" approach for pull based systems is still challenging for most due to business expectations for commitments made to…

In my experience as a Solution Architect for Jira Align, there always seems to be an ongoing client "thirst" for more knowledge from Atlassian learning materials. Strong content can of course help accelerate your enablement process and help maintain understanding in the face of that inevitable user turnover from time to…

In a previous community post, "Jira Align - Help Onboarding Success in setting Edit Preferences" I shared some key preferences that each Jira Align user should consider setting to help improve the user experience. Although ideally these might be helpful settings to configure standard for all users out of the box, the…

Previously, Part 1 discussed some options in the Jira Align toolbox to consider with quarterly closeout activities. The obvious steps at "pencils down" moment typically involve ensuring that Stories, Dependencies, and Features are marked complete. So utilizing the options mentioned in the Crawl and/or Walk levels typically…

As the 1st calendar of 2023 closes, we've had many clients struggle understanding how to use Jira Align on the Program Execution side to best manage finishing up. Like a Sprint for an Agile Team represents the "pencils down!" moment for Story completion, the Program Increment for a Program (aka Team of Team, Release Train,…

Empowering Agile Teams offers great benefits through independence. However, orchestrating threaded efforts both within and across Teams to deliver Features has many risks to success. There are timings of child Stories that support the Features and sometimes dependencies across groups that can become misaligned and impact…

Although the Strategy Room focuses broadly toward outcome rollup metrics, there is a targeted view I share with clients on how to help isolate potential FOUNDATIONAL breakdowns occurring when groups are not completing Features, Stories, and/or Dependencies in a quarter. In this article, I'll describe how to use it. Jira…

One of the more popular frameworks used by Jira Align clients today is the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe). Although there certainly are mixed and diverse viewpoints about SAFe, for this article let’s just consider it as an “encyclopedia” type reference of common patterns for enterprise Agile practices. Under this view, SAFe…

What Am I Doing Here? As there are already many sources of Jira Align knowledge that continue to expand (reference my previous article for example), I’m planning to start creating more “Opinion / Editorial” type articles based on my own experiences that may not necessarily represent a consensus view across Atlassian or…

Hi everyone, I joined Atlassian as part of the AgileCraft (now called Jira Align) acquisition back in May. I'm still learning my way around the Atlassian Community, but look forward to engaging with this group in the future!