💡Is it possible to scale your organization and keep teams connected?

[#1]

Hi Enterprise community 👋

If you’re an admin at a growing enterprise, we know that you’re not only enabling teams across your organization, but you're also keeping leaders in the loop. This can be a challenge with shifting business priorities, bigger teams, different ways of working, disparate tooling, and disjointed information flows. Ensuring your business is in sync and secure while keeping all teams in the know may seem near impossible. That’s why we’re here to start a conversation about how you are tackling these challenges and to share our own scaling best practices.

From our perspective, admins like you are juggling:

• Providing leadership with reporting across the business so they have the visibility to strategically guide teams, make informed decisions, and respond quickly to the competitive landscape.

• Breaking down information silos and standardizing and streamlining workflows across teams so they stay connected, and have visibility into their work and that of other teams.

• Ensuring you have visibility across tools to maintain governance and security standards while still offering teams the flexibility to choose how they work.

In our experience, connected workplaces, modern cloud tools, and comprehensive controls can help teams overcome the scale conundrum, support collaboration, and improve visibility to advance the business.

We want to learn what has been successful for you and where you need more support so that we can continue solving your enterprise’s needs. Look out for new content to hit your inbox as we dig deeper into this topic over the coming months.

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In the meantime, we want to know:

• How have you seen your organization change as it has grown over time?

• How do you drive visibility and connection at your organization?

• What does being connected as an organization mean to you?

• Have you standardized tools and workflows across teams?

• How are you using analytics and data to connect your organization?

• What security controls do you have in place to ensure that you have the visibility to safeguard your organization?

Share in the comments section below!

[Eddy May]

Unifying (Jira) workflows is often like keeping a river clean og sludge and detritus to keep it flowing along the best possible route. I find that balancing a workable central governance with team flexibility quite the challenge at times. Being too restrictive and centralised possibly inhibits local autonomy to make necessary adjustments or experiment at a local project or team level. Allowing for a big degree of autonomy quickly escalates to an explosion of bespoke configurations of the common workflows, resulting in loss of transparency, hindring effective cross-collaboration at scale and loss of transparency.
I am experimenting with partial central configuration restrictions (simplified workflows, mandatory data fields, central automation rules, etc.) whilst allowing for a local autonomy, without breaking the central governance rules.

Any experiences, good and bad, are very welcome.

[Chris Ogden]

Eddy's comment seems to be very similar to the situation I am in. And it also seems he has come to the same conclusions where commonality is desirable rather than dictating a fixed set of workflows. 

I am also toying with the idea of a small 'suite' of workflow schemes and issue types to help teams pick the most appropriate, but which will still allow our metrics gathering (via Plandek) to be valuable, transparent and understandable to whoever needs them. I hesitate to say comparable when looking across teams, although that is the wish of those above, because I would like to think most of us know that isn't actually a 'thing' when looking across 50+ products.

My position is I have multiple Jira sites from acquisition, and a main Jira which has incorporated 8 or 9 other Jira's in there too, so you can imagine the mess. This wasn't one company ignoring governance, it was inherited from many companies all doing their own customisation. I am slightly uncomfortable with dictating to all teams though, hence commonality rather than everything the same.

It isn't a small task though, and I really wish sharing workflows across cloud sites was as easy as import/export, rather than the convoluted way of using Atlassian Marketplace.

As for some of the other points above, due to the ever expanding Organisation, I moved to Jira Enterprise, so cross pollination of users across sites is common, security is beefed up via SSO, and most collaboration/communication throughout the globe is via teams. It all works, sort of!!

[Eddy May]

That is quite the hefty organisation you are managing, @Chris Ogden

Far and beyond the complexity I have dealt with so far. I am preparing our team to look into Jira Align for Large Enterprise support. Although it probably doesn't solve the Commonality challenge (loving the term. Thanks!), this would seem to be the platform of choice for handling multiple sites and instances. Do you have any experiences with the Align solution in regards of cross-organisation workflows and standards?

[Chris Ogden]

Hi @Eddy May 

I did look into Align a few months back, and it maybe something I revisit, but I can't give you anything there I'm afraid. I have a few other priorities on Atlassian first that must be done before Nov 2023 (for those reading in 15 years time) and then I may get back to it. I didn't want to muddy the waters right now.

If you do go for it, I would be interested in hearing back from you though. Best of Luck!