Agile does not suit every organization perfectly. Many global companies successfully implement agile methodologies in some areas, while others continue with traditional practices. Sometimes this is intentional due to specific demands of their industry, such as in construction, manufacturing, or healthcare. Some sectors are simply not as suited to agile practices because of the nature of the work.

In these organizations, blending agile and non-agile teams is the future. But when groups use different methods, leaders find it cumbersome to manage. These leaders face a complex scenario and often recognize the necessity of a unified approach that improves processes and collaboration.

The need for a single solution

In some cases, organizations use Jira and Jira Align to support teams within the agile at scale methodologies and other tools for traditional teams.

But is it possible to merge the work into a single source of truth? Is there a solution that meets both the requirements of scaling frameworks and those of traditional project management?

The wishlist

The need: As a senior leader with some-agile and some-traditional, I want to:

1. Lead top-level enterprise strategy and planning
2. Use one lens to track progress horizontally
3. Deploy a budget review process across the organization
4. Track OKRs (Objectives and Key Results)
5. Connect strategy to deliverables at a portfolio/project level
6. Manage dependencies in one place, irrespective of ways of working
7. Conduct annual/multi-year planning on a single dashboard
8. Track the status of my initiatives
9. Connect my initiatives to OKRs and track progress and key results in one snapshot

Next, let’s consider whether Jira Align supports each of these wishlist items.

1. Lead top-level enterprise strategy and planning

While endeavoring to create a unified strategy that accommodates both agile programs/Agile Release Trains (ARTs) and traditional non-agile projects, our goal is to consolidate this information into a single dashboard. This dashboard would offer flexibility in planning timelines, allowing for weekly, monthly, or quarterly views. For non-agile projects, adopting a Gantt chart approach proves more effective due to its sequential nature—covering stages such as requirements analysis, design, development testing, and deployment—in an orderly progression. Additionally, incorporating agile work items within 2-week sprints enables the continued adoption of agile planning methodologies. This comprehensive overview not only delineates the status of whether a task belongs to either an agile program or a non-agile project but also presents other pertinent details necessary for informed planning and execution.

Roadmaps in Jira Align

Roadmap can help provide a visual representation of how the work(tasks) line up against each other in their current quarter and how they are linked together. They offer a holistic view of your quarters and the ability to manage the work within the quarter, for example, changing the start and end dates or setup the health.

From the organization’s perspective, there are three main verticals of the roadmap:

• Planning upfront
• Tracking while the work is being done
• Reporting throughout

Mainly, the roadmaps are aimed at the executive level management, and project managers who can work with roadmaps through the top-down and bottom-up views.

2. Use one lens to track progress horizontally

A strategic leader would want to have a comprehensive snapshot of progress for every work item across quarter(s), an expandable view that breaks down the progress at each level of the work item hierarchy from projects to stages to tasks. These insights are invaluable for project and portfolio managers aiming to monitor the advancement of all tasks in a snapshot. Furthermore, it empowers portfolio and company executives to oversee how efforts align with strategic objectives, ensuring that the company moves forward in fulfilling its strategic commitments as promised to the board of directors.

In the overview below for the non-Agile initiative, project managers are able to monitor the progress of every sequential stage within the project, delving into the details of tasks associated with each stage.

This work tree view orchestrates your work according to strategy alignment and tracks collective advancement toward those strategies across various programs. By default, this view presents all strategies within the organization, structuring the hierarchy from strategy to theme, cascading through epics, features, and stories. The progress indicators for initiatives and projects, along with their stages, reflect their acceptance rate within a theme.

It’s crucial to compare progress bars against each task related to a strategy. There should be a minimal discrepancy between task progression compared with stage completion rates. Projects naturally may lag due to their broader scope across quarters. A significant gap between task completion and stage progression often signals prioritization issues—usually an overextension across too many features simultaneously. Concentrating on completing individual features before advancing additional stories can mitigate this issue substantially. These backlog management practices will aid in identifying bottlenecks affecting the core development.

This enables pinpointing areas needing attention or adjustments, such as re-prioritizing certain items or modifying project scopes as necessary, thus facilitating targeted intervention where needed most effectively.

3. Deploy a budget review process across the organization

Progress of project work is tracked on a quarter-by-quarter basis, with a focus on inspecting the funding at the project, stage, and task level. This includes comparing the amount consumed across each quarter to the funding allocated for the project stages.

The portfolio room acts as a control panel for the portfolio leadership team and supports its primary functions:

1. Refining business strategy and allocating budgets to strategic projects
2. Identifying, prioritizing, authorizing, and funding projects
3. Adjusting staffing levels of project stages to align with expected demand for prioritized projects
4. Providing fiduciary governance of execution across projects

Additionally, it serves as an information radiator that helps track decision-making from various perspectives. It helps to ensure that emerging spending aligns with the target funding levels (budgets) set.

The portfolio room below shows an overview of:

1. Quarter/PI roadmap: Illustrates months by quarter and the percentage completed based on tasks finished per project stage.
2. Team cost by quarter/PI: Displays each quarter/PI alongside funding and cost values.
3. Work spend: Lists each project and underneath stages associated with selected quarter/PI(s).

Portfolio room in Jira Align

4. Track OKRs

Objectives are set not only at the team level but also at a strategic level. As a senior executive, it’s important to connect strategy to execution. This involves linking the strategic objective to projects, regardless of whether they follow agile or non-agile methods.

As a strategy leader, you can align strategic objectives with project-level goals for both agile and non-agile projects and monitor the key outcomes resulting from these alignments.

The objectives tree in Jira Align presents the hierarchy of objectives and goals through cards. If a selected objective or goal lacks any parents or children, it will be displayed as the sole item in the tree. Each card provides details such as the objective or goal score, name, owner’s profile image, number of aligned (child) objectives/goals, and number of key results. Click on any card’s name to open the details slide-out.

Progress towards key results is indicated by a blue bar at the top of each card, representing cumulative progress across all key results.

Hovering over a card allows you to use green arrows on each edge to hide or show peer, child, and parent objectives/goals. This functionality enables you to expand or collapse the tree:

Objectives tree in Jira Align

5. Connect strategy to deliverables at a portfolio/project level

The OKR hub provides a representation of the parent and child hierarchy between related objectives and strategic goals. It also helps to understand the relationship between strategic goals and objectives you’ve set at different levels of your organization and ensure that child objectives and goals are written in such a way that they inform the next level above.

OKR hub gives users an updated experience for creating and viewing OKRs by bringing goals and OKRs together and showing the relationships between them and their children’s objectives. OKR hub helps leaders with a blend of agile and traditional teams to create and monitor:

1. Project-level objective connected to deliverables at the project level
2. Stage-level objective to stages (analysis, development, testing, deployment)
3. Team-level objective connected to tasks associated with project stages

OKR hub in Jira Align

6. Manage dependencies in one place, irrespective of ways of working

The initial step in managing dependencies within the traditional project management model is to identify them. This can be achieved using various techniques, including:

1. Creating a work breakdown structure (WBS) to hierarchically represent the project’s scope, deliverables, and tasks
2. Utilizing a network diagram to graphically display the project’s tasks and their dependencies through arrows indicating direction and type of dependency
3. Employing a Gantt chart for a visual representation of the project’s schedule, tasks, and dependencies with bars denoting task duration and overlap.

Managing dependencies is one of the key challenges of product development, especially in the waterfall model, where dependencies are the relationships between tasks, stages, or projects that affect their order, duration, or quality.

How to manage dependencies in Jira Align

In Jira Align, teams create a dependency when they do not have everything they. need to deliver an increment of value. Dependencies function as agreements between teams.

With Jira Align, both agile and traditional teams can create dependencies for every unique scenario that surfaces in blended orgs:

1. Dependency between the phases of a non-agile project
2. Dependency between phases of two different non-agile projects
3. Dependency between agile teams and the project stage of non-agile team
4. Dependency between a program (team of agile teams) and a non-agile project/stage
5. Dependency between a non-agile project/stage and an external entity

Example of dependency management in Jira Align

Jira Align unlocks unified dependency management – irrespective of ways of working – and this is one of the key benefits of Jira Align for blended orgs.

7. Conduct annual/multi-year planning in one place

The portfolio room provides a unified dashboard that goes beyond the boundaries of quarters and has the option to visualize the progress on a yearly basis from quarter-to-quarter.

The annual view displays months across the year, along with quarterly progress.

Quarter/PI Roadmap shows the percentage of completion based on completed work items for specific project stages. 

Portfolio leaders also see each quarter, with its current status and percentage complete in terms of effort from completed work items versus total efforts. The view showcases the percentage completion for agile programs and traditional projects.

If you’re curious, the calculation is based on:

• ((Sum of effort/estimates from completed work associated with the Project stages(s) and planned for the quarter) / (Sum of effort/estimates from all work associated with the Project stages(s) and planned for the quarter)) * 100

Portfolio room in Jira Align, continued

8. Track the status of my initiatives

Further along into the portfolio room, leaders can visualize both agile and non-agile initiatives in a nested view. They can traverse the hierarchy down from a non-agile project to its stages and tasks, just they can see hierarchy from an agile initiative to its epics and stories.

The portfolio room serves as a control panel for the portfolio leadership team. Here they can:

1. Refine the business strategy and allocate budget to the strategic/investment themes
2. Define and fund the decentralized value streams
3. Identify, prioritize, authorize, and fund project stages (with support from value streams)
4. Adjust the funding (staffing levels) of projects or programs to match the expected demand represented in the prioritized work backlogs, such as in a three-quarter lookahead
5. Provide fiduciary governance of execution across the portfolio’s value streams

Portfolio room in Jira Align, continued

9. Connect my initiatives to OKRs and track progress and key results in one snapshot

The objectives tree report provides a visual representation of the hierarchy between related objectives and their overarching strategic goals. You can see parent and child relationships between objectives and goals, linked together in either a list or a family tree view.

To view the strategic goal and objective hierarchy, use the tabs at the top of the page to select an objective or goal level. 

In the main section of the page, objectives and goals at the selected level are displayed as items in a list. If an objective or goal has a child’s objectives or goals, you can click the arrow next to its name to display them.

The objectives tree includes information for senior leaders to quickly understand progress and spot blockers:

1. Key results, with percent of target achieved and score
2. Owner of the objective
3. Number of aligned objectives or goals
4. Key result progress
5. Work progress

Parent objectives and goals in the tree can also be filtered by status, health, target completion date, and/or owner.

Objectives tree in Jira Align

Ready to learn more?

Does your wishlist look similar? Is your org a blend of agile and traditional teams? If so, learn more about Jira Align here and then contact our team to get a conversation started.