Jiralympics Week 4: Making forward progress towards your goals with Jira

[#1]

Welcome to the last week of Jiralympics!

This week, the teams are starting their football (or soccer depending on where you are) tournament with teams from each global region. Thousands of people from around the world will come to France to cheer on their favorite countries. Unfortunately, not every participating country will play (there are 206 countries and territories for this year) but the best 16 teams from each region will participate.

The interesting part of Olympic teams is that football players often play on different teams or regional clubs and may only have a few weeks of playing together before the tournaments start. That’s not a lot of time to really get to know your teammates, how to communicate well with them and establish trust on the field.

Football is a sport where communication and visibility are key. Teams must work together, anticipate each other’s moves, and stay aligned on their strategy to score goals. The fluid and dynamic nature of the game requires players to be constantly aware of their teammates’ positions and intentions.

Similarly, business leaders and teams need to maintain visibility into the work being done across the organization to ensure success. Leaders must have a clear view of their team’s activities, progress, and challenges to make informed decisions and drive the company towards its goals.

So what are a few ways that you can help your teams reach your goals?

• Fostering clear communication — In football, constant communication is essential. Players need to convey their intentions, alert teammates to opportunities, and adjust their strategy on the fly. In the business world, effective communication is just as crucial. Executives need to ensure that there are open lines of communication throughout the organization. Tools like Jira facilitate this by providing platforms for team members to share project updates, discuss issues, and collaborate seamlessly with Confluence. This ensures everyone is on the same page and can move forward with clarity.

• Maintaining visibility into team work and goals - Just as a football coach needs to see how players are performing on the field, executives need a comprehensive view of their team's work and progress towards goals. Jira provides dashboards and reporting tools that offer real-time insights into project status, team performance, and potential roadblocks. This visibility enables leaders to make data-driven decisions, allocate resources effectively, and keep the team focused on achieving their objectives.

• Aligning work to goals - Football teams practice plays and strategies to ensure that every player knows their role and how it contributes to the team's success. With Jira, teams can align the work teams are doing with team level and organizational level goals through goals in Jira. This is a new feature that helps reduce friction, improves efficiency, and ensures that everyone is working towards the same objectives.

With Jira, it’s easier than ever before for teams to collaborate, stay aligned, and work towards scoring their goals. For leaders, this means having the visibility needed to guide the organization effectively and ensure that everyone is moving in the right direction.

So, does your organization operate more like a world renowned football team or a community pickup game? How have you set up your Jira instance to help your teams stay synchronized and maintain visibility into goals and work.

[Amanda Barber]

Since I'm at such a small company, I'd expect us to be more like a community pickup game. However, since we're small, it allows for better communication between teams. There are certainly areas we can improve around goal alignment and providing better visibility into those goals across the organization. (Surely even world-renowned teams have areas of growth!)

Go, team! 📣

[Huwen Arnone _Deiser_]

It's funny because in Week 1 of the Jiralympics, I compared my team with a football team. I think it's the perfect analogy, mainly because we're residents of Spain (currently—and recently—European winners).

My team works like a well-oiled pro football machine, where the software tools, team plays and communication are essential to get the work done.

Jira and Confluence play an essential role in our team. They allow us to share project updates, discuss issues, and collaborate, ensuring everyone is on the same page. They also provide each other's work visibility allowing us to stay in sync. Also, Jira dashboards' visibility enables us to make decisions easier based on project insights or roadblocks.🚀🚀 

As football teams align, we do it as much as possible to achieve strategic goals where Jira and Confluence provide the infrastructure to ensure these processes.

[Shawn Doyle - ReleaseTEAM]

Real or fake football? :)

More like a pickup team if real and well oiled team if fake.

[Stephen_Lugton]

The cross-functional / cross-department teams I work with often have multiple Sprint Goals depending on which team members are focussing on data, analytics, devops, reporting, website, communications etc. and rather than trying to list those in the static Sprint Goal field provided by Jira I've created 2 custom field types - Sprint Goals and Sprint Goal Progress (sub-task for Sprint Goal.)

Sprint Goal has custom fields Key Achievements and Challenges which we fill in as part of our Sprint Review, which we've found especially useful for business / technical teams, and these fields then feed into a Jira Dashboard that can be presented to our Exec board.

Sprint Goal Progress tickets represent each one of our goals with fields for which Objective / Project they count against as well as completion criteria, which again are used for reporting through Confluence by updating a filter for which sprint to report on.  We have a separate board for the Sprint Goals, and during our Sprint Review we have a 'penalty shoot out' where we see which goals were a hit or miss.

So I guess we're a semi-pro team

[John Funk]

Same as @Amanda Barber  - we are small here locally so it is more like a pickup game - but with really good players.  :-)