Set goals across Atlassian products
10 min
By the end of this lesson, you'll be able to:
- Describe the relationship between goals, projects, and teams, across Atlassian products
- Set goals that are visible across Atlassian products
How do you set goals in Atlassian products?
Atlassian products support your organization with goals, projects, and teams.
A goal represents an organization’s mission. Goals enable you to provide updates on shared objectives with your entire company through Atlassian products.
A project represents any piece of work that people on your team or stakeholders at your company would like to receive regular weekly updates about. They provide context about the work as well as updates on your successes and challenges. You can view and reference these projects from multiple Atlassian products.
These cross-product projects are different from projects in Jira. Projects in Jira contain more information about a specific team’s work and operations than many stakeholders need.
A team represents the people who will accomplish projects together. Teams are often, but not exclusively, the groups of people as defined in your organizational structure. But, people can belong to more than one team, so you might create a team to represent the people on a short, cross-functional project. You can view and reference teams throughout multiple Atlassian products.
Projects contain goals that teams work on.
Configure a project for your goals
Each company should set a threshold for when they create a project in Atlassian products.
👉 For example: At Atlassian, we create a project when a piece of work involves two or more people for two or more weeks.
Make sure to set a low enough threshold that your teams always have visibility into work that could block, impact, or depend on the work of other teams.
The project owner manages the project’s goals, contributors, and updates. It’s an important role, so you should always assign the person responsible for the project as the owner, even if that changes throughout the project.
To create a project:
- From Atlassian products like Jira, Trello, and Confluence, in the left corner of the top bar, select Switch sites or apps (represented by a grid), then select Atlassian Home.
- From the Top bar, select Create, then Project.
- Name your project clearly and accurately.
- Choose an emoji to represent your project.
- Optionally, connect your project to an epic in Jira. Teams can connect their work in Jira projects with goals and projects in Atlassian Home.
- Select Create project.
- You’ll be directed to your new project’s About section. Use this section to quickly explain what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, and what defines success for this project.
- In the right panel, add Contributors to your project. These are the people who will work toward this project’s goals. They’ll receive automatic updates on the project’s status.
- In the right panel, add Followers to your project. These are the people who need frequent updates on this work, like stakeholders, managers, and cross-functional peers.
👇 Here's what a project looks like.
Configure goals
When your organization completes its planning for a quarter or year, create goals in Atlassian to represent the outcomes of that planning.
To create a goal:
- From Atlassian products like Jira, Trello, and Confluence, in the left corner of the top bar, select Switch sites or apps (represented by a grid), then select Atlassian Home.
- From the top bar, select Create, then Goal.
- Enter a Name for your goal.👉 For example: If you’re using the OKR framework, enter your objective as the name of the goal.
- Pick a Target date for the goal’s completion.
- Assign a goal Owner. This is the person responsible for updating this goal. They’re also usually the person who answers questions from stakeholders.
- Select Create.
- You’ll be directed to your new goal’s About section. Use this section to quickly explain what your goal is and why you’re pursuing it.
- In the right panel, add the teams who will contribute to this goal and any followers.
- In the right panel, create or add sub-goals for any related goals that support this one. Sub-goals appear on their parent goals so people can easily see the relationship between them.👉 For example: If you’re using the OKR framework, create a sub-goal for each of your key results.
- Select the Projects tab to connect your goal to a project. This enables people to quickly see all goals related to a project.
👇Here’s what a goal looks like.