Sync data top to down with Jira Automation and Marketplace apps for Strategic Alignment

[#1]

Context

In today’s fast-paced digital enterprises, alignment is everything.

Organisations risk falling out of sync without clear visibility into how individual tasks contribute to broader strategic goals, creating inefficiencies that derail even the most well-laid plans.

For project-driven organisations, this alignment often begins with the tools they rely on to plan, track, and report on their work. Modern project management tools like Jira can empower teams to manage their workloads, but achieving full alignment - where strategic goals are visible across every level of work - remains challenging.

Visibility isn’t just a nice thing; it’s essential for effective strategic planning, reporting, and decision-making. When Program and Project Managers, delivery teams, and vendors can access consistent, hierarchical data, they gain a shared understanding of priorities and dependencies.

This shared context fosters collaboration, avoids misalignment, and ensures that every team’s efforts pull in the same direction. What’s more, the alignment needs to be continuous rather than a point in time once a quarter, but part of a constant re-examination process to reflect changes occurring in a timely manner.

---

Options for Achieving Hierarchical Visibility in Jira

For Jira Premium users, Atlassian offers Plans (formerly Advanced Roadmaps), enabling organisations to create a work hierarchy that spans initiatives, features, epics, tasks, and subtasks. This hierarchy allows teams to connect the dots between high-level business objectives and day-to-day activities.

With Jira Plans, users can:

• Plan across multiple teams and projects.
• Track cross-project dependencies and timelines.
• Gain a high-level view of how work ladders up to strategic goals.

However, the real power lies in ensuring that information from the top levels of the hierarchy, such as themes or strategic pillars, is defined and accessible to delivery teams and external collaborators. This visibility impacts awareness, accountability, and alignment across the organisation, ensuring everyone is on the same page regarding goals, priorities, and constraints. 

A lot of the information stored at the top level of the hierarchy serves as the source of truth for further decision-making. These can be links to Confluence pages, attachments or custom field values that aim to mark work in a certain way to distinguish between specific Initiatives. As an example, some enterprise customers choose to update the following custom fields during different stages of their planning process: 

• Strategic Theme
• Risk Level
• Team (can be the built-in field provided by Plans or a custom field depicting the delivery team)
• Planning interval
• Product Version
• Budget
• Cost Center
• Customer
• Priority

All of the above might directly affect the day-to-day operations of a delivery team and their prioritisation and planning. The priorities and directions coming from the top must be considered, aligned with the capacity and availability of resources and fed back to the top to shorten the loop between critical decisions and execution. Without the systematic synchronisation of the “markers”, filtering and manually tagging those work items often falls on already overloaded Project Managers, Scrum Masters and Team Leads. 

Automatic propagation or copying of select flags, tags, or labels as signals from the top of the hierarchy to the rest of the branches would free up a lot of time otherwise spent on manual tasks and increase the accuracy of reporting. Once the work is underway, tracking the progress per specific slice across all the levels of hierarchy based on the value of one of these fields should be easy and reliable. 

Several options are available for Jira admins to achieve this; below are just some of them, either out of the box or through Atlassian Marketplace.  

---

Jira Automation: A Partial Solution with Key Limitations

Atlassian tools feature an out-of-the-box powerhouse: the Jira Automation tool. Teams, large and small, use it daily to eliminate manual task creation, generate notifications, and even perform complex calculations. 

Jira Automation can also propagate information through a hierarchy, enabling top-level data like labels or fields to be copied to child issues. 

For example, the automation rule can:

• Be triggered when an Initiative is created or updated.
• Propagate key details (e.g., tags, due dates) to lower levels like Features, Epics, and Tasks.

While this functionality is powerful, it comes with important limitations:

1. Complexity: Setting up automation rules for multi-level hierarchies can be cumbersome, requiring multiple interdependent rules and conditional logic.
2. Performance: Asynchronous execution and branching can lead to timing issues, particularly in large hierarchies.
3. Scalability: For medium-to-large organisations, the number of automation rule executions can quickly exceed Jira Premium’s 1,000 runs per user per month limit, making it unviable for high-frequency updates (see screenshot).

Maintenance: Updating rules to accommodate changes in project structures or hierarchy levels requires ongoing effort, increasing administrative overhead.

---

Introducing EasySync: Simplified Data Propagation for Modern Teams

EasySync addresses the limitations of Jira Automation solution by offering a purpose-built solution for hierarchical data propagation. Designed for scalability and ease of use, EasySync enables organisations to align their project data effortlessly. 

When EasySync detects a change in the value of a field it is configured to "sync" - it automatically copies the value down the levels of the hierarchy that you have configured. EasySync gracefully handles cases such as when a new issue is created within an existing hierarchy and when an issue's parent changes.

EasySync Use Cases:

Here are some impactful use cases that showcase its capabilities:

Collaborative Team Coordination (Atlassian Teams Integration)

• Scenario: Teams defined in Atlassian tools represent functional or cross-functional groups. EasySync propagates Team assignments across the hierarchy, ensuring clarity about which teams are responsible for various initiatives, features, or tasks.
• Benefit: Streamlines team collaboration and coordination, enabling large organisations to operate effectively across multiple teams and workstreams.

Risk Management

• Scenario: High-risk Strategic Initiatives are flagged, and EasySync propagates these risk indicators to all associated tasks. Teams can prioritise mitigation plans based on the flagged issues.
• Benefit: Ensures that risk awareness permeates all levels of the organisation, enhancing proactive planning.

Customer or Product Segmentation (EasyTime Integration)

• Scenario: Tags for specific customer segments or product lines are applied at the top level. EasySync propagates these tags to all related work items, and time tracking app EasyTime captures the actual time spent per customer or product automatically and in real-time while the delivery team interacts with their Scrum boards, code repositories or IDEs (integrated development environment).
• Benefit: Enables detailed native reporting on effort allocation for customer or product-specific workstreams, improving insights into profitability and service delivery. 

Time Tracking for Budget or Cost Centers (EasyTime Integration)

• Scenario: Budget, Cost Centers or Accounts are assigned to Initiatives and tracked throughout the hierarchy. EasySync propagates this budget data down to all work items, while EasyTime automatically tracks time spent on each issue while teams work with Jira, Confluence or Bitbucket.
• Benefit: Provides visibility into resource consumption against budgets and improves accountability, ensuring financial alignment across projects. Report on budget using native reporting tools or multitude of timesheeting/budgety apps from the Jira-native work logs without a need for complex roll-up logic. 

Strategic Label Propagation

• Scenario: An organisation assigns labels to Strategic Initiatives to categorise them by business objectives. EasySync automatically propagates these labels down to all related Business Outcomes, Features, Epics, and Tasks.

Benefit: Facilitates consistent reporting and ensures all team members are aligned with strategic priorities. It makes curated information available to the teams that otherwise don’t have access to high-level plans or restricted Jira Projects.

---

Conclusion: The Case for Cross-Hierarchy Alignment

For modern organisations, achieving alignment across project hierarchies isn’t optional—it’s a necessity. Whether through Jira’s built-in capabilities or advanced tools like EasySync and EasyTime, enterprises must ensure that strategic markers flow seamlessly through all levels of work while actuals, results, and other performance signals roll up. By adopting solutions that enable scalable, reliable data propagation, organisations can enhance their reporting, improve alignment, and ultimately drive better business outcomes.

With tools like Jira Automation and EasySync, you can take Jira to the next level, ensuring that your teams stay aligned and your data stays actionable—all while simplifying processes and saving time.