Scaling Agile with Jira Align: A practical guide to strategically scaling agile across teams, programs, and portfolios in enterprises

Accelerate business value delivery with Jira Align, the enterprise agile planning platform, by connecting strategy with execution to maximize outcomes

Key Features

• Improve coordination and transparency between multiple programs, products, and business portfolios
• Increase customer satisfaction by responding quickly to ever-evolving customer needs
• Deliver higher quality products faster and more predictably with real-time insights and OKR tracking

Book Description

Jira Align is a platform purpose-built for enterprises to connect strategy with execution and drive transparency, consistency, and predictability at all levels of scale. The platform supports business value delivery in agile frameworks such as LeSS, DAD, and SAFe. It also caters to organizations that mix agile with waterfall to support scaled bimodal delivery.

Starting with an introduction to the platform and its features, this book takes you through the foundational building blocks of Jira Align. You'll learn how an organization can benefit from implementing Jira Align and understand how to connect dimensions such as people, work, time, and outcomes. The book takes you through the typical steps for implementing Jira Align for maximizing outcomes and helps you solve common team, program, and portfolio-level challenges by enhancing visibility, tracking dependencies and risks, and using reports for real-time, distributed decision making. Throughout the book, you'll explore features such as remote agile ceremonies, live roadmaps, and objectives and key results (OKRs). You'll also get to grips with lean portfolio management, financial reporting, and using the program board for planning and execution.

By the end of this book, you'll be well versed in the key features of Jira Align and be able to leverage them to support all levels of agile at scale.

What you will learn

• Understand Jira Align's key factors for success
• Find out how you can connect people, work, time, and outcomes with Jira Align
• Navigate and collaborate in Jira Align
• Scale team agility to the portfolio and enterprise
• Delve into planning and execution, including roadmaps and predictability metrics
• Implement lean portfolio management and OKRs
• Get to grips with handling bimodal and hybrid delivery
• Enable advanced data security and analytics in Jira Align

Who this book is for

This book is for portfolio managers, program managers, product managers, product owners, executives, release train engineers, and scrum masters who want to empower their teams to deliver the right things at the right time and quickly respond to changes in the market. Familiarity with agile frameworks and Jira Software is necessary; the book will teach you the rest.

Table of Contents

1. Introducing Jira Align
2. Implementing Jira Align
3. Using Jira Align
4. Team Challenges
5. Program Planning Challenges
6. Program Execution Challenges
7. Portfolio Challenges
8. Bimodal Development, Advanced Data Security and Analytics

Dean MacNeil has been passionate about agile practices and tools since before they were called "agile", having pioneered a form of iterative and incremental product delivery at the world's leading music company in the mid-1990s. As an Atlassian Certified Consultant and Enterprise Agile Coach, MacNeil has helped companies of diverse sizes and verticals, including some of the world's largest and fastest-growing companies, to improve business agility and outcomes. MacNeil also writes about music and is a lifelong musician. He lives in Los Angeles where he enjoys hiking, biking, and sailing with his son.

Aslam Cader is a software professional with over 10 years of experience working with teams at all levels to solve complex business problems while improving business productivity and agility. As an Atlassian Certified Consultant, Cader has helped companies standardize business processes around lean, agile, ALM, ITSM, DevOps and digital transformation programs. He is particularly passionate about scaling agile, governance, and best practices to support the scaled use of Atlassian stack, cloud and ecosystem solutions. He lives in London and enjoys traveling and time with his family.