A Quick Guide to Jira Align — What You Need to Know

Last updated on March 4th, 2023 at 02:43 am

If you work in marketing, project management, or business analysis, then you’ve probably heard of Jira. It’s a popular issue-tracking and project management tool used by teams around the world. But what is Jira Align, and how can it help your team? In this blog post, we’ll introduce you to Jira Align and show you how it can help you streamline your projects.

What is Jira Align?

Jira Align is an agile software program that helps enterprise organizations track and manage their projects. It is also a scrum management tool that provides transparency and accountability for team members, not to mention helping organizations increase visibility, accountability, and collaboration across teams.

Jira Align Features and Benefits

Features

Project Tracking

Jira Align allows users to track the progress of their projects and see how they are progressing over time. Users can also see how much work has been completed and how much remains to be done.

Task Management

Jira Align allows users to create and manage tasks for their projects. Users can assign tasks to team members, set deadlines, and track the progress of tasks.

Resource Management

Jira Align provides users with a way to manage resources for their projects. Users can assign resources to tasks and record the usage of resources over time.

Reporting

Jira Align provides users with reports that show the progress of their projects. Reports can be customized to show specific information about a project.

Dashboards

Jira Align provides users with dashboards that allow them to see the status of their projects at a glance. Dashboards can be customized to show specific information about a project.

Benefits

• Provide a more optimized and predictable delivery by aligning organizations at every level of scale — investors, analysts, and employees.

• Accelerate value delivery by shortening product cycles, upping operational efficiency, enhancing quality, and swiftly responding to market fluctuations.

• Quickly responding to market changes and shortening the time-to-market process leads to better customer satisfaction.

• Always stay true to your why by using a program that unites product, portfolio, development team, and other areas.

• Jira Align can be thought of as an ERP tool for large-scale software development. If implemented correctly, Jira Align ensures that an organization spends more of its time pulling in the same direction, which is aligned with its strategy.

How does Jira Align work?

If you’ve ever worked on a project, you know that there are a million moving parts and often things can get…misaligned. Jira Align is here to help with that.

But how does it do that, you ask? Well, my inquisitive friend, let me tell you. Jira Align does this by tracking all the work being done on a project in one place and keeping everyone informed about what needs to be done and when.

To be more technical, Jira Align is only effective if your organization already utilizes large-scale software development and is committed to an agile scaling framework, such as SAFe, LeSS, DAD, Spotify, etc.

If these prerequisites are met within your company, Jira Align will be able to integrate with one or more instances of Jira Software in order to aggregate team-level data up to the Program, Portfolio, and Enterprise levels. The integration can also be set in two ways so that changes in strategy at an organizational level will then trickle down and impact the work that teams prioritize through their tools in Jira.

Jira Align utilizes data from Jira Software to give in-depth reports on every aspect of progress, thereby allowing stakeholders such as Product Owners and Portfolio Managers to see the progress toward goals more easily. In addition, if there is a need for more than the 180 built-in reports, the underlying data can be shared with your organization’s business intelligence (BI) tool for further analysis.

Jira Align makes it simple to plan the events that are part of your agile procedures, like Program Increment planning, Scrum of Scrums meetings, Retrospectives, and even a team’s Planning Poker. Every story is connected to a particular Program, each Program is linked to a Portfolio and every Portfolio relates back to the Enterprise’s top-level goals.

By using these connections, Jira Align communicates how every task supports the organization’s objectives so everyone knows what the benefit will be.

When detailed information from every team is organized into categories like epics and features, it helps management prioritize work. This is because they can see how much effort would be needed to implement an epic or feature versus how much benefit would be gained.

By assigning costs to work items and giving managers real-time insights into budgets, the platform also makes financial planning easier.

In short, Jira Align is like having a Fairy Godmother who waves her magic wand and makes all your project management dreams come true.

What is the difference between Jira and Jira align?

Jira Align is beneficial to enterprise-level businesses because it provides teams with visibility into planning, dependencies, roadmaps, and more in real time. Jira Align differs from Jira software in that the former connects teams while the latter simply connects members of different teams.

Jira is the world’s leading agile project management tool, excellent for supporting the work of single teams. Jira Align connects to Jira and oversees the efforts of multiple agile squads towards a set of usual objectives. It meets the requirement of big organizations to synchronize their teams.

In the modern world, nearly every organization needs software to some capacity in order to run smoothly. As software becomes a bigger necessity and development budgets grow annually, it is crucial for organizations to be able to invest wisely. Jira Align does precisely that by allowing them to prioritize valuable projects, get products/services on the market faster, and do so all while being more predictable.

Jira Align FAQs

What is Jira Align?

A: Jira Align is a software that helps enterprise businesses plan and tracks their work. It can be used to manage agile projects, product development, and other types of work.

What are the benefits of using Jira Align?

Jira Align provides visibility into work progress and performance, enabling better decision-making and faster delivery of value. Additionally, it can help businesses improve communication and collaboration, as well as increase efficiency and optimize resources.

How much does Jira Align cost?

Jira Align pricing depends on the number of users and the features you need.

There are two categories of pricing: Standard and Enterprise. Standard costs less than Enterprise. Here is a video at the Atlassian site that will tell you what you need to know:

Is Jira Align right for my business?

If you are an enterprise business that needs an enterprise agile planning tool to help you plan and track your work, then Jira Align is definitely worth considering.

Conclusion

Jira Align is an enterprise agile tool that can help your business increase productivity, achieve goals and measure progress through agile practices.

By understanding how Jira Align works and what its key features are, you can decide whether or not it is the right tool for your business strategy.

For businesses that have used Jira Align to great effect, check out our case studies. If you’re sold on Jira Align and want to get started, check it out here.

Author Bio

Dani Lehmer is the Founder and Head Honcho of Dani Digs In.

She is a Quality Assurance Analyst and blogger whose natural curiosity allows her
to dig in (pun intended) to help people build their businesses and satiate curiosity
in regard to data science, analysis, and crypto.