Introduction

“A fool with a tool is still a fool.” - Grady Booch (Software Engineer)

Decisions to make

• Is the leadership team adopting a new way of working (e.g. Agile Release Trains focused on Value Streams) and/or seeking a change in their approach to program operations and governance?
  • Decide how the team-of-teams will coordinate planning and delivery activities
  • Define the feature lifecycle/workflow, from idea to done
  • Decide how much consistency is necessary across teams
• Who will decide how much change (or how little change) to pursue, as the team considers adopting new ways of working across several leadership “innovation areas”
  • Decide what practices to standardize across teams and how to manage the needed behavioral changes
  • Decide how governance meetings will support monitoring and risk management needs
• Decide on a common vocabulary (“platform terminology”) for the team, work, and time hierarchies that will be used across the enterprise in the Atlassian platform.
  • Teaming hierarchy - from the whole enterprise down to small teams
  • Work hierarchy - from strategic initiatives or goals down to stories and tasks
  • Time hierarchy - from multi-year funding windows down to two week sprints

Context

• It is very common to deploy Atlassian tools like Jira Align in conjunction with a scaled agile transformation across the enterprise, often led by an Agile Center of Excellence (CoE) with executive sponsorship
  • In these scenarios, the deployment of Jira Align is one piece of a larger puzzle, and that is coordinated by the sponsor of the changes
• Changing a team’s mindset can often be more difficult than just adopting a new tool or process. Applying proven change management practices can reduce the risks
  • At the program level, a great example of this is moving from teams owning features to the program owning features (collective ownership)
• Agile at scale is acronym-rich and confusing for business people with little (or no) previous agile training. If the groups do not use common terminology, this challenge is even bigger
  • There are different scaled agile frameworks in the industry, and they often use different words to describe similar things
  • Every company has a historical set of terms for describing work and teams, both for the old way of working, and possibly for a custom-built new way of working (internal process definitions)
• Sometimes program leaders are already holding meetings for program governance (e.g. status meetings), and there is concern that the changes will “add more meetings” instead of being leaner
• Sometimes a program might be recently formed, and gaining consensus on changes may prove difficult
• Sometimes program leadership teams adopt industry standard frameworks like SAFe, Scrum@Scale, or Spotify because they offer concrete change approaches to help a program transform and adopt new operations and governance practices
• Sometimes the product leaders will drive the program and use best practices from product management (e.g. personas, design thinking, value engineering, etc.) to drive operations and governance

Why we care

• Deployment plans for a tool like Jira Align can be created (and executed) much faster when they are done in the context of the adoption of a documented framework for a “new way of working” (e.g. an internal framework, or SAFe, or Scrum@Scale, etc.)
  • Organizations will need to document the “operating model” that defines their new ways of working
  • Configuration of a tool will depend on the details of their unique operating model
• If changes in leadership behaviors and delivery results are sought with the deployment of a tool (and they usually are), then it is recommended to create a change management plan to coordinate the sponsorship, communications, deployment, and learning associated with the changes
• Often, one of the first challenges faced in a scaled agile transformation is addressing the new vocabulary used for basic elements of working: for work, teams, and time
  • To scale agile, leaders must find a balance between giving autonomy to teams and getting some standardization across the organization
    • Programs will build plans (in the form of roadmaps) and ask teams to align their work with the aims of the program. How this is done can vary from program to program, but it must be done consistently within any one program leadership team
  • Terminology should be set consistently across the enterprise to break down communication barriers from the teams through to the executives
    • Without a common vocabulary, teams can’t communicate effectively, let alone align
• Leadership teams should strive to be high-performing teams too, and adopt a continuous improvement mindset
• Program leadership teams need to actively manage a backlog of features to support the overall strategy of the portfolio and enterprise

The Atlassian view

• Atlassian products (e.g. Jira Align) provide a platform that can enable processes, practices, behaviors, mindsets, and frameworks for scaled enterprise business agility
  • Deploying Jira Align as a tool will not yield scaled enterprise business agility, but it can help accelerate the changes
• Configure Jira Align to support the goals of the enterprise coaches; seek out those that are driving organizational changes in behaviors (and their sponsors)
• The path to a new, better way of working should follow these stages:
  • Form the leadership team
    • Who is accountable?
  • Iterate on the new way of working
    • What are the jobs needed? Who on the team is doing them?
  • Bootstrap the in-flight investments into the tooling (e.g. from spreadsheets) to improve transparency for everyone
    • Can we create a snapshot of today’s work in progress first?
  • Incrementally debut the new governance meetings in a climate of safety to support learning, and build a new way of working that improves business agility
    • Can we commit to trying out the “new way of working” fairly soon?
• Deployment of Jira Align can help support and accelerate the adoption of new behaviors and practices, but good change management practices are essential for driving transformation at this scale
  • Effective learning for the leadership team (e.g. on how to use Jira Align) is best done via reference materials (“job aids”) that outline the new behaviors, practices, and processes with examples from the tooling
  • Change management should provide an answer to the question, “Why are we deploying Jira Align?”
• Atlassian recognizes that different enterprises will use different words or terms for the same concepts for work, teams, and timeboxes, etc.
  • Sometimes the words used are a blend between industry frameworks, legacy vocabulary that is unique to the company, and/or terms from legacy tools
  • Jira Align can be configured to replace the out-of-the-box terms with the local vocabulary being used to drive the scaled agile transformation across the enterprise
• Leadership teams can leverage plays from the Atlassian Team Playbook to establish a continuous improvement mindset and improve team cohesion