Jira Align: The 10,000-foot view of an agency

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When spending taxpayer money, it’s important to government leaders that the project benefits outweigh the costs. As discussed in our blog "Using Modern, Agile Dashboards to Power Today’s Government Programs", tracking and planning become ways to keep project costs low and completed on time. This is where dashboards can be so effective. 

Jira Align can give you enterprise or agency-wide visibility into the value each project or initiative nets in return. Teams can track which initiatives are delivering and which might need a closer look by giving you a view of the value you get from each project or initiative and automatically rolling up to the wider program level. 

Question for the Atlassian Government community:  How have you seen Jira Align dashboards help with decision-making within agency enterprise planning environments?

[Dick Stark]

Jim, I can speak for one large government RightStar/Atlassian customer that is just starting a Jira Align rollout. They chose Jira Align first, to better standardize this Agile/SAFe practices across their large organization, and second, to get a better idea of how the work that is getting done ties to their overall agency mission.  We should know the results in about six months. 

[Dave Liao]

I haven't yet seen Jira Align in a production environment - only in demos - but would love to! (One day...)

[Craeg Strong]

Ditto for me; I have not yet seen Jira Align in production but have attended a few demos. The demos have gone through many of the features but I have not yet seen a fully operational realistic use case "day in the life" showing how senior leadership uses the tool

I would love to see a case study of some Jira Align dashboards developed for a specific leadership use case at a customer.  Being in the Federal space, I have seen several RFPs asking for a solution that can help tie high level business strategies and objectives directly to the activity of the technical teams-- especially to validate hypotheses and identify when to pivot.

I personally have struggled trying to implement "hypothesis-driven development" where we say something like: "we expect these features to enable us review 30% more instances of possible prior art, while reducing the average patent application processing time" which could for example support a strategic objective of producing higher quality patents that are less subject to legal challenge.    

These dashboards would combine operational metrics such as "average patent application processing time" together with development metrics such as throughput and cycle time.   This data could be sourced from various places such as an Enterprise Data Warehouse, some operational feature metrics from LaunchDarkly or Unleash, and throughput and cycle time metrics from Jira-- All tied to OKRs at the strategy level.

To me this is the holy grail, and it seems like Jira Align could be the centerpiece of this solution.    Would love to see something like this in action!  

[Sam Nadarajan]

Hey! I'm in the same boat as @Dave Liao - I have yet to see an instance where this has been used in production, but from what I've seen regarding SAFe features and standards it's pretty well "aligned" with that framework.