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Forrester Spotlight: The Total Economic Impact of Jira Align
Learn how enterprises cut time to market in half and see up to 340% ROI with Jira Align
Executive summary
While organizations continue to adopt agile at a rapid pace, it doesn’t come without its challenges. Midsize enterprises struggle with scaling agile practices across teams of teams, leading to poor visibility, lack of insight into what’s being built, and frequent delays.
In this spotlight, commissioned by Atlassian, Forrester Consulting shares results and insights from interviews they conducted with two midsize enterprises that adopted Jira Align. The spotlight study details the organizations' top challenges, decision-making process, and benefits they realized after implementing Jira Align.
For the full story, download the spotlight.
In this spotlight, you will learn:
Common challenges organizations face when scaling agile practices and how to overcome them
The financial and operational benefits two midsize enterprises saw after implementing Jira Align, including a 340% ROI over a three-year period
How Jira Align improves collaboration and communication across departments, increases team productivity, and leads to better investment decisions
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Scaling Agile Beyond Software Development Teams Improves Productivity At Midsize Enterprises
Midsize enterprises, or organizations with less than 5,000 employees, struggle to: scale agile practices across the business; foster high levels of coordination between disparate teams; and maintain a level of visibility into work that is similar to the world’s largest organizations. Rapidly growing organizations may be experiencing these challenges for the first time. However, by overcoming these challenges, midsize enterprises can retain the agility of smaller organizations as well as compete against larger enterprises with deeper pockets.
With Jira Align, leaders can set goals in the form of objectives and key results (OKRs), and they can connect those objectives to work being done in their team’s tool of choice. Jira Align aggregates team-level data to enable managers to view dependencies, coordinate teams, optimize spending, and manage products at the program and portfolio levels. By onboarding teams to Jira Align that are outside of software development, two midsize enterprises were able to realize organizationwide agility.
SOLUTION REQUIREMENTS
The interviewees’ organizations chose to invest in Jira Align for the following reasons:
- Agile-first architecture. The interviewees saidthey sought a tool that had enterprise agility in its DNA. The VP of product operations said, “Jira Align was built from the ground up to support agile ways of working, whereas [our previous tool] was not.” The senior manager said, “Other tools that we looked at had [Scaled Agile Framework] modules, but their main tools were for waterfall or traditional project management. They technically checked the box, but they weren’t inherently designed around the SAFe model, and we knew we’d have issues later on.”
- Easy to use. The VP of product operations said her organization enjoys using the tool, stating: “We preferred [Jira Align’s] usability, look, and feel. It just resonated with everyone a lot more. ... Jira Align just ticked all of the boxes, and I had no trouble getting it approved.”
KEY RESULTS
The composite organization, which is representative of the six decision-makers’ organizations, experiences the following financial benefits:
Project managers, product managers, and program managers (PMs) realized overall time savings of up to 70%. The VP of product operations said that Jira Align simplifies and streamlines their team’s preparation before meetings. Where planningmeetings for PMs previously took 2 hours, now ittakes 30 minutes.
The senior manager said: “Instead of having a file in [project management software] and a [slideshow] with a roadmap timeline — files that could be local or outdated — [the product teams] are now using objects in Jira Align. That’s made conversations significantly more efficient ... [PMs] are still doing the same [types of] work, but [those tasks are] a lot easier for them.”
Development team productivity increased by 10%. Interviewees said Jira Align increased PMs’ visibility into developers’ work, which enabled PMs to better prioritize those tasks and ensure developers were spending time on the highest-value work. The VP of product operations said, “Before [we started using] Jira Align, people just prioritized the [tasks] that seemed to be the most relevant, which meant we had fragmented solutions and timelines. We’ve made a lot of process changes as well as tool changes [such as adopting Jira Align], and together they all support our new ways of working.”
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