What is the difference between a comprehensive Enterprise Agile Planning solution and an Agile project management tool like Jira Software?
Agile Project Management tools, like Jira Software, provide a means for developers and project managers to plan, track, and manage many aspects of Agile software development projects. Mostly geared toward bug tracking, ticketing and code check-in and check-outs, they support teams using Agile methodologies like Scrum, Kanban, or hybrid approaches like Scrumban, in their development of products and services.
Enterprise Agile Planning tools represent an evolution from project-centric, bug tracking and ticketing Agile tools. They support a product-centric approach, focused on customers and the delivery of value. Enterprise Agile Planning tools connect business strategy to delivery by supporting both Agile and traditional portfolios while enabling team, program, and portfolio-level planning. While many businesses use enterprise Agile frameworks like SAFe to guide their pursuit of enterprise-wide agility, these tools are built to complement their use.
Enterprise Agile Planning solutions further the drive to agility by enabling organizations to operationalize not only how they plan, but also fund and deliver, value. They often provide robust financial management modeling functionality to access different funding, cost and capacity scenarios while helping an organization stay focused on the outcomes and objectives that are most important. Enterprise Agile Planning solutions also help organizations align to value streams, grouping areas of capabilities or persistent demand into functional groups (or products) for streamlined funding to areas with high value opportunity.
What are some of the key capabilities to look for in an Enterprise Agile Planning solution?
- Support for team, program, and portfolio-level planning
- Support for a combination of traditional and Agile portfolios
- Support for businesses making the project to product shift
- Support for distributed Agile teams in the planning, coordination, and delivery of business value
- Support for disparate Agile team tools and their integrations
- Support for financial management and scenario planning of costs, funding and capacity
- Support for capacity planning and management
- Support for dependency management
- Support for Agile methodologies like Scrum, Kanban, or hybrid uses cases such as Scrumban, and more
- Support for the use of enterprise Agile frameworks like SAFe, LeSS, DA and more
What is the difference between Jira Software and Jira Align?
Jira Software was first launched in 2002 as a bug tracking tool for software developers. As this product and the Agile development space evolved, Jira Software rose in popularity as an Agile project management tool primarily amongst Scrum teams for its flexibility, ease of customization, and low cost. It is most used by teams looking to effectively manage a project that does not need cross-project, cross-team coordination or organizational level planning and visibility.
Although Jira Software leverages a data hierarchy with nomenclature commonly used in portfolio-level planning (“epics”), it does not support this level of planning. In addition, it does not natively support customization of its issue hierarchy. These points, coupled with the fact that Jira Software cannot support cross-project and cross-team coordination involving things like the management of dependencies, as well as other scaled Agile use-cases, does not make it a good fit for teams interested in applying the use of enterprise Agile frameworks like SAFe.
In 2019, Atlassian acquired Agile management platform provider, AgileCraft, and rebranded its solution as Jira Align. Jira Align is Atlassian’s answer to scaled agility. This tool complements the use of Jira Software by providing a means of conducting portfolio-level planning leveraging select data mapped from execution teams whose work is tracked primarily in Jira Software.
We have teams that use Jira Software. Can we integrate Planview’s Enterprise Agile Planning solution with Jira and other Agile project management tools?
Yes, Planview’s Enterprise Agile Planning solution gives teams the flexibility to continue to use the Agile execution tools they are familiar with or that are already tailored to support their processes. Whether teams use Atlassian’s Jira Software, Jira Core, or Jira Service Desk, or other tools like Broadcom’s Rally Software, Microsoft Azure DevOps, or Digital.ai (formerly CollabNet VersionOne), Planview allows Agile teams to connect their tool of choice into a program or teams-of-teams board with ease – enabling them to continue delivering value without disruption.
