Enterprise Insights in Jira Align: How Meaningful Information is Gathered from Data

Organizations invest a significant amount of time and money in collecting data. However, they often lack the appropriate tools to analyze and draw meaningful conclusions from this data. Enterprise Insights, a feature set of Jira Align, addresses this issue by bringing together program and portfolio data, allowing organizations to visualize real-time trends and patterns. This, in turn, lays the foundation for making better business and workforce decisions.

One of the primary challenges many organizations face is a lack of information. While they may possess the necessary capabilities, they often lack insight into how these capabilities are being utilized and whether they contribute to the organization's progress. As a result, inefficiencies arise in the form of bottlenecks and duplicated work. Complicated processes hinder the delivery of customer value, and without the right data and analysis, the actual problems remain concealed.

The real problem: the flow of knowledge

Good data and precise analyses help to identify such problems and get to the root causes. Often, it becomes apparent that the organization doesn't have a capacity problem but rather a knowledge problem. The proliferation of multiple tools across different teams has made it challenging for knowledge to flow seamlessly. While a lot of work is being done within the company, it often resides in various places: spreadsheets, documents, presentations, and unsynchronized systems.

Meanwhile, management is left in the dark, relying on reports from managers, status check-ins, or single data sources that fail to provide all the necessary information or present it in a way that generates meaningful insights.

How data becomes information

Solving this problem must occur at two levels. First, there is the data aspect. The leadership team needs to collect and synchronize diverse systems while investing in resources that allow them to store and analyze the required data for specific needs.

Secondly, the team needs a way to view the data that enables leadership to make real-time decisions about budgets, capacity, bottlenecks, and project viability. This involves reports, charts, comparison views, and a visual hierarchy.

Visual hierarchies

Visual hierarchies play a significant role in this process. In Jira Align, this view is called the "Objectives Hub." It provides a visual representation of the hierarchy between objectives and their overarching goals. This includes tracking whether objectives are on track or at risk, identifying the timeline for each objective, and determining the responsible parties accountable for their achievement. Such status information must be visible and accessible to management without having to click through numerous pages in multiple systems.

So it's about more than just tracking the progress of work. It's not merely a matter of working through tasks, it is related to the progress of achieving key results. The most critical question is: Are the activities we are undertaking bringing us closer to the actual business goals?

Investments versus expenditures

When a new development cycle begins, there is a financial plan. However, simply imposing the plan on the teams and hoping for the best is unlikely to work as intended. Work is fluid. Unexpected challenges and shifting estimates are bound to arise.

Leadership requires a clear view of financial allocation, estimated spend, and released spend - all presented in one report and updated in real-time.

This live visibility enables management to see the facts - not anyone's interpretation of them. When management observes teams doubling down on capacity estimates (contradicting budgeting) to stay on track, interventions are possible before real distress occurs.

Customizable data views

It is worth emphasizing that every company is different, and consequently, the reporting requirements also vary. Are there reports that virtually every company needs? Certainly! Are there specific aspects that most organizations should regularly examine? Absolutely!

However, it is equally important to acknowledge that certain data points are critical for some organizations while being entirely dispensable for others. Therefore, it becomes crucial for every organization to access all its data when needed - not solely relying on the 100+ reports provided by Jira Align. True flexibility comes when each company can extract precisely the niche information it requires from the data lake, tailored to its specific use case.

That's what Enterprise Insights is all about: It transforms Jira Align into a data marketplace where we can connect with our favorite tools to obtain precisely the information we desire. We can synchronize with other reporting platforms, integrate external reports into Jira Align, and automatically map reports into Confluence. The data will be available wherever management and teams need it most to make informed decisions.

Enterprise Insights enables drawing meaningful insights from an ever-deepening sea of data to avoid bottlenecks, optimize processes, identify incorrect estimates early, and ultimately prevent wasting time and money.

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Are you interested in learning more about software-enabled Agile scaling in large organizations? We would be delighted to discuss with you the requirements for an enterprise-wide agile product development and product management system, and demonstrate the capabilities of Jira Align in a personal session. Just get in touch with us!

Further Reading

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Jira Product Discovery: Casting Ideas into a Structure

Atlassian Analytics: A New Foundation for Data-driven Decisions

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