Agile at scale path summary

Summary

As a program leader, you have questions about how Atlassian products can help you accelerate your move from a traditional way of working into a leaner, faster, and more agile approach to decision-making. You seek to connect the enterprise strategy down through all the teams working in the program, and you need better visibility into the work to make that happen. You want to drive deeper conversations around the value of the work, and optimize the investments you make, even in times of uncertainty.

Atlassian has built these paths to connect the practices defined by the thought leaders in the program management community to the specific user experience in Atlassian products, like Jira Align.

Personas

These paths are designed to support jobs historically performed by the following roles in an enterprise:

Program Manager
Project Manager
Business Analyst
Scrum Masters
Product Owners

In the transition to a new way of working, the role names and responsibilities will likely change. A good audience for these paths will be people in your organization with skills aligned with these historical roles.

Problem definition

A team-of-teams mindset is designed to improve business agility for leaders across the organization. Agile-based program management emphasizes the following differences from traditional program management:

Bring the work to the people, not the people to the work
Plan, execute, and deliver as team, leveraging cadence and synchronization
Focus on defining the desired outcomes, instead of desired quantity of outputs
Develop a definition of “value” and focus more on value delivery than managing costs
Revisit past decisions – and plans – every quarter based on new feedback

Practice innovation areas

In the path to the Agile at Scale solution, the organization will innovate both the way they model their work (e.g. hierarchies and workflows), and the way they work (e.g. operations and governance activities).

Practice innovation areas present choices for

the data model needed by the leadership team for decision-making
the behaviors of the program leadership team (seen in the purple and blue boxes in the third section of this article)

In most companies, these areas are transforming as the leadership team pursues new ways of working. Therefore, these are the areas that are ripe for “practice innovation.”

Solutions architecture for the Atlassian agile at scale solution

Technology stack for the Atlassian agile at scale solution

Product	Function	Configuration
Jira Align	Enterprise-level Strategy Management	Capture the highest-level corporate strategic goals to enable the connection of team-level execution to enterprise strategy.
	Portfolio-level Investment Management	Establish a unique backlog of investment opportunities for each LOB/BU or business domain across the enterprise.
	Program-level (Teams-of-Teams) Work Management	For each portfolio, establish several collections of teams (i.e. Programs) that need to plan and execute together to effectively deliver value to customers and the business.
	Reporting	Determine which native reports in Jira Align can help leaders make decisions.
Jira Software	Team-level Work Management (for technical teams)	Make the work of each independent team visible on a unique board in Jira Software, to define the source-of-truth on the scope of work owned by the team.
JSW Premium: Advanced Roadmaps	Program-level (Team-of-Teams) Roadmapping	Build 3-6 month roadmaps of work for a collection of teams that plan together to support multiple projects or stakeholders.
Confluence	Knowledge Management	Team definitions and responsibilities; APIs, requirements, specifications, etc.
Enterprise Insights	Data Analysis	Build custom reports leveraging your data from Jira Align.
Trello	Team-level Work Management (for non-technical teams)	Collaborate with teams on activities such as retrospectives.
Tableau, etc.	Reporting, Data Visualization	Determine which external reports (built on data from Atlassian products) are needed to help leaders make decisions.