We're exploring these capabilities in our Sandbox environment, but the fact that Atlas/Platform Experiences is in beta/EAP may prevent us from adopting it in Production. Can you clarify when (it sounds like in 2025) these capabilities will be GA?
I can get behind the direction of travel Atlassian is heading - and I can see the Atlas feature set as a valuable addition to making a more refined, enterprise experience but it presents cognitive challenges to organisations that have already extended their Jira hierarchy above epics to create initiatives (or equivalent).
Should an Atlas project replace the initiative in Jira? Atlas implies this because it straight away offers the opportunity to link to epics, not to any other issue type.
I can see the logic in this - epics as MVPs, areas of focus, capabilities needed etc. BUT for organisations who already use Jira and have scaled their hierarchy to Initiatives or beyond this is a confusing situation. I suspect they will end up keeping the Initiative in Jira (esp. if tied to workflows etc.) then duplicate the epic links... parent to Initiative in Jira, and Atlas link to the project.
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@Sean Blezard totally agree! We were waffling on this as well. We decided to keep initiatives in Jira for those that don't use Atlas, as well as for the general structure/organization in Jira itself, grouping the epics under an initiatives was a lot cleaner. So it is a bit of double work to reproduce the hierarchy, but they have different value and use-case for us. Some initiatives do not turn into Atlas projects to report on.
I've also been evaluating Atlas and looking at potential usage patterns/models.
With regards to Projects being naturally aligned to Jira Epic issue types, I've provided feedback that it should be any issue type at Epic level or higher. I think that is just a short term omission due to few customers using Plans. Once a Project is created it can be linked to any issue type - the Epic restriction is just in the Create Project dialog.
The issue of Atlas Projects essentially being a proxy for a Jira initiative is an interesting one. I initially assumed Projects were just there for organisations where not all delivery work was tracked in Jira. I omitted Projects from my initial strawman. However I now see Projects serving three purposes:
1. Modelling delivery work not in Jira.
2. Grouping many Jira initiatives into a single Project that make sense from a stakeholders perspective (e.g. executive governance for a complex program of work)
3. Being the public face of a Jira initiative for stakeholder comms.
Digging into #3, most organisations will have a varying degree of stakeholder interaction with Jira. While the "doers" and perhaps business owners will have heavy interaction with Jira, many stakeholders won't. So it's more user friendly to have an Atlas Project which acts as the public face for status updates. It also doesn't clutter Jira comments with both active collaboration and passive status updates.
One suggestion I've made is to add Projects to Automation so you can create a Project when you create a Jira initiative automatically. Without that, I see Projects as an overhead so I'm omitting them from my design.
When do you think you'll move existing Atlas customer to platform experiences then? It's been 6 months now since your announcement, could you please publish an update?
Having spent an hour with a client going through Atlas for their organisation, the result was
1. There are some nice visualisations e.g. the 3 questions to prompt people or the way a progress measure is visualised.
2. It's badly integrated into the Jira experience and ecosystem - lots of double-keying and cognitive burdens around how to use it (link to initiative, link to epics)
3. Weird constraints on only one progress measure per goal (since goals + measures aligns well with the OKR concept and there we'd have two or three key results in some cases)
4. Really messy sync with Jira (it actually crashed a couple of times and gave a weird "Can't find your issue" until I refreshed the screen - this is for the "where is the work tracked" but.
It's a no for them - they will continue to use Confluence, Jira, and Structure for their big picture view.
Atlas is classic Atlassian these days, go shiny and go fragile/half-baked. I hope this is just a temporary stage in Atlassian's evolution. As someone who uses all the products (apart from Atlas) I can see that it's failing the ecosystem test... which is to say, each new thing added to the ecosystem makes it richer and more powerful without it becoming harder to work with.
We expect for this to ship towards the end of December 2024 and rolled out throughout January 2025. Once this feature is ready and rolled out we'll sen an email letting admins know the migration is coming and then start moving workspaces from Atlas to Platform experiences.
If all goes well I'd expect the migration to happen within February 2025 or March 2025, depending on delays. As I mentioned, we'll send out more formal communication once we get closer.
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November 21, 2024 edited
@Sheryll Minnie to start, can you please confirm there's no Atlas in your product list? Any chance someone else added it just to test at some point? If you navigate to https://home.atlassian.com/ do you see a tab for goals and projects?
If the answer to all of these is "no" then it might be a bug. I'd recommend reaching out to our support team via http://support.atlassian.com/contact
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November 21, 2024 edited
Hi @Dunlap_ Mark J, are there specific features you need that are missing from the Platform experiences EAP that you need for adoption?
I want to emphasis that Platform experiences are as compliant as Atlas is, and Atlas has been GA for a couple of years now. We're working on adding more compliance and enterprise capabilities throughout 2025, like data residency for example, which will make Platform experiences even more capable than Atlas was (by that point every Atlas customer would've already been migrated to Platform experiences so everyone will get it!)
I can say that we're planning to officially announce Platform experiences as GA at Team 25, but again, we're as compliant as GA Atlas is already. This includes support for things like SOC2, GDPR, and audit logs.
If you do have a specific feature or capability you're waiting on though please do let me know! And of course I'm here to answer any other questions you may have.
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
November 21, 2024 edited
Hi @Sean Blezard , appreciate your and other's feedback here.
As some mentioned, you can already link Atlassian/Atlas projects to issues above epics. But you're right that we need to update the copy on that linking feature. @Darrel Jackson's explanation is pretty spot on for the value projects provide today when linked to Jira. Projects aim to help teams represent real-life projects, which can include both technical and non-technical components. Then communicate progress, decisions, and risks to a wide range of stakeholders. Sometimes this means linking a project to an epic, an initiative, or neither.
I do want to acknowledge your feedback for the current way Atlas/Platform experiences work with Jira. I will say that our ultimate goal it to make it easier for you and your teams to capture, track, and report on work with Atlassian. And so improving the relationship between projects, goals, and Jira will be a big focus for us in 2025, including streamlining how work is captured and minimising duplication. We'll be sharing some of this vision at our Team 25 event so keep an eye out for that (April 2025).
In the meantime if you (or anyone else reading this) have any questions or feedback please keep commenting on this post. Otherwise if you'd like to chat please feel free to book some time with me here: https://calendly.com/niratlassian/30min
Hi @Nir Nikolaevsky thanks for your comment! Now that you ask, we are really looking forward to the permissions, which you already mentioned. Would love to have it more locked down from an admin perspective and have a specific group of delegates to manage these things. I think some enhancements around Projects, such as the ability to designate an issue type above an Epic (e.g., we have "Portfolio Epics" as the next layer up) as a Project. Typically an Epic is just a part of an overarching deliverable. I would also like to see the nesting of Goals represented on a Plan in Jira. Currently, even if nested, they're represented at the same level. We are running a POC of this all in our Sandbox environment, so I hope to have more feedback to share in the new year - perhaps we can hop on a call sometime!
Back to my original comment though, it really boils down to the language we have to agree to by opting into the EAP and the lack of coverage for Beta/EAP we have in our Agreement. Until this intercept isn't in the mix anymore, our counsel prefers things stay limited to Sandbox.
Is anyone currently using Atlas as a communication channel for external stakeholders clients? Are there other better approaches and tools to bring in trusted product stakeholders, while taking advantages of the efficiencies of having development progress, a rich medium, and 2 way feedback?
We're currently using Atlas with our key stakeholders/lighthouse users to expose large features and initiatives, while also leveraging hashtags to centralize ~release announcements for dev teams, internal stakeholders, and external stakeholders.
We'd probably use Atlas more as it was intended for internal staff and actually be able to use goals, since private goals seems to not be on the roadmap now, if we had another tool or you could really isolate communities of teams.
---Update---
I actually just found the new JPD Public roadmap and maybe a relevant option, eventually:
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