Get to know Jira Align: FAQ

[#1]

What is Jira Align?

Jira Align is an Enterprise Agile Planning platform that connects work to product, program and portfolio management at scale. It connects and brings together all that data together harmoniously so that you can get real-time, fully informed reporting across your organization.

How is it different from Jira?

While Jira connects teams to each other, Jira Align connects teams to the business. Large enterprise organizations use it to ensure that teams can have the right visibility into realtime product roadmaps, portfolio plans, dependencies, and much more

Does it integrate with Jira?

Yes. 80% of Jira Align customers use Jira at the team level, so our integration is proven to work at scale and perform robustly in the long term with years-long installations. The integration goes well beyond simple field mapping - there is logic built in that detects anomalies and sync options that allow the customer to handle inconsistent user practices.

How is Jira Align different from Advanced Roadmaps?

Jira Align helps you solve your business agility challenges, by connecting strategy to execution and measurement of outcomes. It’s built to help you improve value delivery to customers at every level of the organization, across many programs and portfolios. It’s the only solution on the market that can be configured to support your choice of framework, including custom or hybrid ones. Jira Align takes you beyond real-time visibility into the work and towards true enterprise evolution and transformation.

Advanced Roadmaps helps you visualize the work happening in Jira Software. It’s a great fit for teams of agile teams, up to the program level. It helps you create a realistic plan, manage dependencies, manage capacity and share a visual roadmap of future releases.

Compare all the differences between Jira Align and Advanced Roadmaps.

What are the benefits of Jira Align?

Jira Align connects your business strategy to technical execution while providing real-time visibility. It allows enterprises to aggregate team-level data and makes all work visible across your enterprise in real-time. All layers of scale are connected, and everyone can get on the same page to determine scope, roadmaps and dependencies across teams and portfolios. You can easily connect strategic investments with customer value created in order to drive outcomes faster and more reliably.

How secure and scalable is Jira Align?

It was purpose-built for scale, designed to accommodate organizations the size of customers such as AT&T, Anthem and Fidelity. Our cloud architecture scales on demand, providing consistent performance and reliability. For organizations with specific security and compliance requirements, private cloud options are also available. Our data centers utilize the latest industry standards to implement the highest levels of physical, network, server, and application security. We provide data redundancy measures and thorough information security policies to ensure the integrity of your data. Our infrastructure and certified data centers have all passed the same stringent security audits applied at top financial service institutions around the world.

What scaled agile frameworks does Jira Align support?

It offers out of the box support for all the most popular scaling frameworks such as SAFe, Scrum@Scale, Spotify, LeSS and more. It also allows configuration of custom, internally developed frameworks. Terminology can be customized to accommodate custom or hybrid models.

What reporting does Jira Align offer?

Out of the box, Jira Align offers over 150 reports that we’ve designed over the years that specifically cater to our customers' every need. From traditional agile team metrics to lean portfolio value insights, the majority of the reports you need are already built for you. For deeper insights, we offer a business intelligence solution that allows you to mash up data with other data sources using Tableau, Spotfire, or other popular visualization solutions.

What size organizations are the best fit for Jira Align?

Enterprise organizations of over 1,000 people are generally the best fit for Jira Align. You may also be a good fit for Jira Align if you:

• Are working to align the work of teams, programs, and portfolios

• Are working with leadership to standardize tooling and reporting across many agile teams (50+)

• Would like to visualize and align the work of multiple programs or ARTs across your organization

• Are connecting the work of teams to strategy and funding at the portfolio level

• Are using a scaled agile framework or are creating your own to enable an agile/digital transformation

Who are the typical users of Jira Align, and what are the benefits specific to these roles?

• Portfolio managers: Allows them to communicate the value of funding strategic initiatives to investors, analysts, and employees

• Executives: Connects strategy to execution to drive enterprise value of your high-level mission and vision

• Delivery teams: Enables them to execute against sprint work that tracks back to your company’s high-level strategy

• Program Managers and RTEs: Ensures programs run smoothly and resources are perfectly allocated for on-time delivery

• Product managers: Can manage idea intake, prioritize the feature backlog, and track progress with real-time roadmaps

• Transformation teams: Drive digital transformation with a framework customized to scale agile in your enterprise

How much does it cost to purchase a Jira Align license?

Because Jira Align is used in larger organizations, pricing has a different structure than Jira. You can find out more about Jira Align pricing here.

How can I find out more about Jira Align and talk to a human?

We'd love to talk to you more. Please reach out by filling out this form and we'll be in touch with you very soon!

[Yevhen Rohovets]

Hello,
According to the description, a very interesting product, tell me if there is a server version? I did not find prices for the server on the site

[Christian Ziegelt @sp]

Hi Shana,

For example companies like ours, who are not allowed / not willing to put this data into the cloud - no matter what security options are promised.

Not having a server version will be a complete stopper for us - maybe leading to a decision to leave the Atlassian ecosystem in the end.

We really hope, this isn't a sign for Atlassians move to "Only Cloud" as a whole.

Best

[Emily Harshman]

Jira Align (prior to Agile Craft) is a phenomenal product.  The feature board is auto dynamic and makes a huge difference in the transformation for the portfolio and enterprise layers.

[Shana]

Christian Ziegelt @sp Thank you for your comment and question! Unfortunately, we do not offer a self-hosted version of Jira Align at this time.

We understand that for many organizations, cloud security is a sensitive topic and can sometimes present challenges to overcome. We have worked with some of the largest enterprises around the world to address their concerns and deploy Jira Align in the cloud. You can learn more about our cloud security and compliance policies here. 

[Kelli Cristina]

Hi!

We're evaluating Jira Align and I would like to know if you have more informations (links or demos) or some document that show the "how to do" of the processes in the tool. Is possible share?

Best regards,

[Stephanie Bailey]

@Kelli Cristina

Thanks for your interest in Jira Align! You can watch our latest demo video here: https://bit.ly/2mt58lG

Here's another great asset - wanted to share the latest Gartner Magic Quadrant report that has some good insight into Atlassian and Enterprise Agile Planning tools. https://bit.ly/2MfsR1i

Also, happy to connect you with one of our awesome team members that can share more with you. Would you mind sharing your email address with me?

Cheers!
Stephanie

[aj senol]

A non-server version is a stopper here too.  A cloud only version probably won't work in a highly sensitive environment.  How does ur solution (built specifically to) address CNSS 1253, 800.171, 800.53?

[Tim Keyes]

Hi @aj senol 

Thank you for reaching out to the Jira Align community.

Jira Align has SaaS based customers in highly regulated private industries including Insurance and Financials.

Jira Align is SOC 2 Type 1 and is finalizing SOC 2 Type 2 for this year.  

Specific questions on what we have done with some of our Federal Government Customers in the past would be best discussed with a member of our sales team.

You can initiate a conversation with our sales team by navigating to https://agilecraft.com/pricing and clicking contact sales on the bottom right corner of the site.

Thank you!

Respectfully,
Tim Keyes

[Andy - PTC Redundant]

How is Jira Align different from Portfolio?

I get this question at Community Events and as a leader who doesn't use either and thus has no knowledge on the subjects, I am pleased I can send the chapter members to the Online Community to get their answers! 😎👍

[Deepanshu Natani]

Is there any knowledge base which has detailed information about reporting capabilities of Jira Align?

[Tim Keyes]

G'day @Deepanshu Natani 

Welcome to the Jira Align Community!

Our larger knowledge base can be found here:

https://agilecrafthelp.zendesk.com/hc/en-us

Program Level Reports can be found here: 

https://agilecrafthelp.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/sections/115001716768-10X-Program-Level-Reports

Portfolio Level Reports can be found here:

https://agilecrafthelp.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/sections/115001702787-10X-Portfolio-Level-Reports

Cheers!

Tim

[Deepanshu Natani]

Thanks a lot @Tim Keyes 

[Fadoua]

After watching a webinar today, I can really tell that the name fits the application. It does Align Teams and projects. 

I would like to watch a live demos as an end users  then as an admin.

Hopefully I will get more exposure to the product.

[Mukund Iyer Rajamony]

While JIRA align offers a very rich set of reporting tools, Iam to understand portfolio offers similar at a program level.

I'd appreciate help in understanding pros and cons of portfolio versus jira align more clearly.

[Emily Koch]

This is a great overview @Mandy Ross ! Thanks for the FAQs!

[Shawn Kessler]

@Mandy Ross thanks for crafting such an insightful FAQ!

[Heather R]

Clicking on "Please reach out by filling out this form and we'll be in touch with you very soon!" does not bring me to a form?

[Ahmed_A_]

According to this answer here:

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-Align-questions/Can-Jira-Server-On-Prem-and-Jira-Align-be-integrated/qaq-p/1269953#M270

An Atlassian employee says there is an on-premises version available...

[Greg Bailey]

Hello,

Im the Jira/Confluence administrator for my company and I've been asked to find out if there is a way to independently evaluate Jira Align on one our Jira test instance as we normally do with other add-ons etc.

From what I can tell this is not possible, can I please get a confirmation on this so I can correctly report back to my management?

Thanks in advance,

Greg

[Fadoua]

@Greg Bailey 

it is not an add-on. Jira Align is web base application

i hope this answers your question

I did attend recently an Atlassian Webinar about Jira Align it is worth the try. I like it better than portfolio 

Best

Fadoua

[Greg Bailey]

Thank you Fadoua.

I do understand Jira Align is a web based application. I worded my sentence poorly or inaccurately..  

We normally evaluate add-ons on a test instance and I was trying to find out if there is a way to evaluate Jira align against our test instance.  Im thinking not as it seems the Cloud instance is only setup for a production integration once it's decided to use it and the self hosted version is either not yet available to do this or if it is available as mentioned in another community discussion it may not able to be setup as an evaluation instance.

[Fadoua]

May be @Mandy Ross will have a suggestion to help. I was told during webinar after I insisted that i can get access 1 week access to Atlassian Instance to give it a try. 
let’s see what Mandy thinks @Greg Bailey 

Best

Fadoua

[Moran Hazan]

How can I enable it for a trial as a site admin for Jira cloud? 

[Mandy Ross]

@Greg Bailey @Moran Hazan While there is no trial version of Jira Align, there is a training/evaluation platform called Launchpad. As it's by invitation only, I'll forward your email address to the Jira Align Enterprise Development Reps. 

[Moran Hazan]

@Mandy Ross Looking forward to get the invite