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.  :-)

[Casey Gould]

We have a 'playbook' of sorts for our Epics. We use Epics for a number of automated reports and to visualize the full organization portfolio, so there are places where we need the team to be consistent and nail the fundamentals. The star of the playbook is a database that includes the Field Name, what values we want in the field and any text field formatting, key automations that are triggered based on the field or set this field, examples of where we export this information (thank you, Jira to Sheets sync!) for outside reporting, where (details, tab, etc.) to find the field, and when (if ever) we expect the field to be updated.

[Alex Koxaras _Relational_]

Our company is medium to small, but our Atlassian dpt is rather tiny. We have setup our jira to work in our company's best interest, without ignoring how end users interact with Jira.

[Kavitha Chandrasekaran]

A few months ago, we were like a football team coming together from different organisation for a new project and not knowing each other prior. But with making the best use of Jira, Confluence and reporting tools, we started collaborating well and are now a winning team. We use these tools to set a culture of openness, transparency and clarity.

We use Jira as our source of truth for all the work and status. We have team and management dashboards to show various metrics - Sprint health gadget, EPIC roadmap, status of defects, velocity history, etc. We use these metrics to have an open discussion/retrospectives and find ways to make continuous improvements.

We have installed Marketplace Apps for reporting, that accentuates the presentation of the data. Our steering co loves the clarity we provide through the reports. 

We mainly use a Sprint board. But also have a few Kanban boards to give different view for varying set of stakeholders. 

Confluence is our team go to place for all information related to our project. We have set the culture that every team member is a owner of the project confluence space and should not hesitate to contribute. 

In Jira, we have filters and added them in Favorite filter widget of the dashboard, to help maintain Jira hygiene. The team also subscribes to some filters so they can keep their Jira issues accurate. For example, the test team uses a filter to identify Bugs without an environment, or issues without a parent.

I believe the use of right tools defines the culture of the team/organisation. Jira and Confluence promotes openness, team contribution and effective collaboration. 

[Summer Hogan]

I think my team and organization falls in the middle of a professional team and a community pickup game. We have our Jira instance setup in ways that keeps us operating at full capacity and I think Jira Align has really helped us maintain visibility into our goals and work. Even though Jira Align is cumbersome to use, once you get to know it, it becomes a valuable tool, especially for insight for business teams into what IT is doing for their projects/initiatives. 

[Leslie Barrett]

Right now I feel like we're in a pickup game consisting of really good players who have been together for quite awhile. We're playing in a rapidly expanding neighborhood and as new folks see what we're doing, they want to be a part of it.

As with most companies, our primary Jira users are software engineers. Over time, the departments on the operational side of the business have been able to see the transparency, metrics and overall planning capabilities in Jira and want all of that for their teams. Now, we can provide a better picture of the efforts needed for our products - from concept through ongoing maintenance. This new way of working has helped drive many efficiencies and process updates. Additionally, having the data available has led to improved communication and more meaningful conversations across the working teams.