What keeps you up at night?

For leaders, sleep often evades them as they ponder: Do we have the right people working on the right things? What are their goals and do those support our company’s top priorities? Are we investing enough in those priorities?

Atlassian is here to help put many of those questions to bed with Atlassian Focus, our new enterprise strategy and planning solution. It provides a central hub for leaders to map and track goals, work, teams, and funds, keeping everything aligned to strategic priorities.

The cost of a cloudy view

Today, leaders struggle to evaluate if teams are making progress toward the right things as several obstacles cloud their view:

  • Information and updates are everywhere and nowhere all at once—across spreadsheets, slide decks, disconnected business intelligence tools, and more.
  • Work and dollars aren’t mapped back to specific priorities.
  • They can’t visualize progress through the lens they care about the most.
  • Existing strategy & planning solutions are too rigid and require herculean efforts to customize to a company’s unique structure and operational rhythm.

When leaders make decisions without clear visibility across the organization, it has significant ramifications. According to Gartner®, “by 2025, 70% of digital investments will fail to deliver the expected business outcomes, due to the absence of a strategic portfolio management (SPM) approach.”1

Atlassian Focus is here to clear things up.

Keeping everyone focused on what matters most

Today, many of the world’s largest companies—including Lumen, Lutron Electronics, and NCR—rely on Jira Align to prioritize and plan work across their organizations.

Failing to capture strategic guidance and integrate that guidance with downstream tools is how you keep the old ways in place. But Jira Align is shining a light and allows us to share information across teams.”

Ben Bard, Senior Director of Systems Engineering, Lutron

Focus complements Jira Align’s enterprise planning capabilities by connecting strategic priorities to structured goals, all work, supporting teams, and associated funds. The combined offering keeps teams aligned to what matters most, helps leaders make decisions that keep strategic priorities on track, and enables organizations to pivot strategy quickly when needed.

Focus provides:

→ A central hub to stay focused on priorities: Leaders can track goals, work, teams, and funds, keeping everything aligned to strategic priorities, with what Atlassian calls  “focus areas”. Additionally, each focus area comes with qualitative updates from teammates, giving additional context needed to really understand how teams are making progress or where they are blocked.

Visualization of strategic priorities with focus area maps: Leaders can get a 10,000-foot view of the progress being made across goals and initiatives, updated in real time.

If needed, they can quickly drill down into any sub-focus area or goal. This is especially important when goals are off-track.

→ Microsoft Teams/Slack Notifications and AI-powered summary updates: Leaders get notified as soon as something changes that they need to pay attention to. Leaders are just one click away from getting a summary of a focus area, including what’s in progress, how goals are progressing, suggestions for where to pay attention, and recommendations to proactively address.

Enterprise OKR goal-tracking across Atlassian products: Focus provides a flexible approach to help organizations adopt and govern the objectives and key results (OKR) framework, whether that’s within specific departments or organization-wide. Leaders can quickly see which OKRs ladder to a specific focus area, evaluate how they are progressing, and drill down when committed results are at risk. Information is centralized on the Atlassian platform so it’s simple to identify where goal progress is impacted. Updates happen in real-time across Atlassian products, creating a single source of truth for all leaders and all teams.

Visibility across existing tools: Teams that already use Jira and/or Jira Align to plan and track delivery or work can easily bring that work into Focus.

For more information, visit http://atlassian.com/solutions/enterprise-strategy-and-planning

Our mission: unleashing enterprise strategy

Atlassian is doubling down on enterprise strategy & planning with Focus, helping leaders get a clear picture of how goals are progressing, what work is being planned and delivered, and how teams are deployed.

We’ll continue to deepen our capabilities in this area to help leaders:

  • Track all work, no matter the tool teams use, with 3rd party work management platform integrations
  • Inform and act on talent planning discussions and decisions, with detailed information on teams working on strategic priorities – for example, by region and role, along with open and filled positions
  • Plan and track budgets, and ensure priorities are properly funded, by bringing in financial data from 3rd party tools

See the future of Enterprise Strategy and Planning

Focus was announced in front of thousands at Atlassian’s annual user conference, Team ‘24 Europe. Weren’t able to join us in Barcelona? You can check out the session on our Enterprise Strategy and Planning portfolio – Unleash the potential of your enterprise strategy – on demand on Monday, October 14.

1 Gartner, Elevate Your Discussion to Drive Strategy Execution, Anthony Henderson, January 9, 2024. GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the US and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

Announcing Focus, Atlassian’s new enterprise strategy and planning solution