Shared goals, signals, and measures for your governance board
What is an Atlassian Advisory Board?
An Atlassian Advisory Board is a group whose charge is to receive, evaluate, and approve (or decline) requests for changes to be made to one or more Atlassian tools.
Shared goals
In order for a governance board to track the success or failure of changes, they decide upon a shared set of goals. These goals should be discussed with the understanding that most objectives will require smaller pieces of work to be done. The board should develop smaller objectives that can be used to track the progress of the larger objectives. The following list of items should give you an idea of how your board can create and use shared goals as they decide upon new tasks and changes.
Another great way to achieve an agreed-upon set of team or organizational goals, signals, and measures is to run through Atlassian’s Goals, Signals, and Measures Play!
Goal tracking
There should always be a means of tracking the progress of work on an objective or change. Having a system of tracking these objectives allows the board and those doing the work to have shared visibility of the items they are attempting to complete.
Consider using kanban boards in Jira to track the work being done on the shared goals. No matter the work and issue types involved, using a shared kanban board allows for the governance board to be able to see the effort being put forth.
- It would be a good idea to use the “Epics” functionality in Jira to track the larger goals the board has decided upon
- Track the individual pieces of work on those objectives as “Stories”
Another option that may make sense for your organization would be to track goals and progress with Jira Align.
Acceptance criteria
As discussed above, it's important to create a set of acceptance criteria for each goal. Having these objective criteria documented allows the board to have a better understanding of the amount of work involved. It also allows them to use objective criteria when marking a goal as a success or failure.
Consider using a Confluence page to track the primary goal and the acceptance criteria. Having a page allows the board to have more thorough documentation outlining the criteria involved and defining the goal at hand.
Shared metrics and signals
It's important to create a set of shared metrics and signals to use when tracking the changes being made in the present and the impact of these changes after the work has been done. Not only do shared metrics allow for the board to have visibility into things such as time spent on objectives and the progress made on those goals, but it also allows for them to see the future state of these objectives after they are completed. This can help guide the future decisions a board will make such as estimating the time involved when deciding on shared goals. Other common examples include tracking change rate per development cycle and correlating changes with incidents.
Using reporting features and apps
- Jira Reporting — The reporting functionality of Jira can allow for a governance board to maintain the data they have agreed upon when watching the progress of the shared goals they set. For example:
- The “User Workload Report” allows your governance board to see how much work a specific member has already taken on and estimates how long the work assigned to them will take
- The “Average Age Report” allows for visibility into the average amount of days the issues in your project have been in an Open status
- The “Resolution Time Report” shows the board the average amount of time taken to resolve stories and issues
- eazyBI Reports and Charts — This is one of the most popular reporting apps in the Jira marketplace and can allow the board to report on custom metrics if the Jira Reporting functionality does not suffice.
- Pivot Reports — This is another popular reporting app that is designed to give a bird's eye view of larger goals, the work going into each, and the people doing the work. There are many other features provided so this app is definitely worth taking a look at.
Shared signals
Depending on the types of changes being made, it can be very important for the governance board to be alerted if any technical issues or defects arise from them. If the board is alerted when certain systems go awry, they can see if their changes are having adverse effects and can be better prepared when setting similar goals and acceptance criteria. Some of the tools that can be used, as well as common signals set for monitoring and alerting, are listed below.
Common recommended tools
Tool | Category | Description |
|---|---|---|
APPLICATION SERV/NET | Used internally at Atlassian. Application monitoring provides end-to-end transaction tracing, application response times, JVM Analyzer, thread profiling, and more. | |
APPLICATION ADD-ON | Offers an integrated platform to monitor all application infrastructure - end user, application, database, & infrastructure. | |
APPLICATION LOGS | Splunk provides log monitoring and is popular with our customers. You can select between their Splunk Enterprise and Splunk Cloud offerings. Splunk is used internally by Atlassian, but mostly for alerting and error monitoring. | |
LOGS | Used internally by Atlassian (along with New Relic). Easy-to-use out of the box, very flexible and great for small teams. Cloud-based monitoring, graphs, real-time visibility and alerting. |
Governance board completion criteria
Completing the below items will help make your governance board more successful when setting future goals, following through with the objectives related to those goals, and monitoring for any adverse effects from changes put into production:
- Establish a list of best practices related to goal setting.
- Best practices can include anything from “No more than 3 primary goals at a time” to “We will always use ‘Epics’ as our primary issue type for primary goals”.
- Just like the goals, the best practices need to be shared, agreed upon by the governance board, and followed.
- Establish a list of common metrics your governance board will use to track the overall work and success of the primary goals.
- Select a way of monitoring changes after they have gone into production.
- Be aware of all of the different metrics you can monitor to signal adverse effects created by completed changes, and know which to use for the types of goals you are completing.
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