As businesses try to get a handle on all the moving parts to bring products with value to the market, having vision into those parts becomes critical.

They want to know that what they’re working on aligns with business goals over the long term, that their resources are channeled properly, and what impediments are blocking their achievement of those goals.

To that end, Atlassian is announcing its Value Stream Management solution, built on its Jira Align tool that has helped companies scale their agile efforts enterprise-wide.

“The value of Jira Align is about connecting the dots, from tracking work in Jira Software or Azure DevOps,” explained Natalia Baryshnikova, general manager and head of product, Enterprise Agility at Atlassian. “Jira Align truly embodies the philosophy of Atlassian called the open tool chains,” with integrations to Atlassian tools and others.

Baryshnikova said that whatever work you do on a team level, “we can roll it up and we can connect into the holistic picture.” That capability, she added, plays well with value stream management … because in order to be efficient, you need to be efficient on multiple levels of the organization. “You have a concept of a team-level efficiency, you have a concept of efficiency across teams, and then overall, you can measure and evaluate values streams that you define on those different hierarchical levels of the organization,” she noted. 

When the Value Stream Management solution update becomes generally available next month, it will feature more than 20 out-of-the-box dashboard templates for measuring progress against milestones set by the organization. Those dashboards can be seen in Atlassian Analytics, the company’s visualization platform released in July that connects data from Atlassian’s tools and those of third parties, and also in Enterprise Insights with Jira Align, according to the company’s announcement. 

Further, the company pointed out that it is seeing customers taking an emerging interest in using Confluence Whiteboards, currently in the early access program, for value mapping and creating value stream templates. 

Among the benefits, Atlassian detailed in a blog announcing the release, are:

  • Get end-to-end visibility across your organization, from high-level insights to granular details, using data from multiple sources to get comprehensive reporting.
  • Align work to outcomes, like OKRs, to surface non-value-add work and show a value stream’s impact.
  • Streamline processes and eliminate bottlenecks by identifying dependencies and roadblocks, automating manual tasks, removing unnecessary steps, and stopping wasting resources.
  • Measure the right things to set your team up for success by analyzing important metrics, such as team efficiency, customer impact, and software reliability and performance.
  • Bring business, DevOps, and IT teams together to develop innovative software – from concept through delivery – with shared data and cross-functional teams.

“We worked with some of our customers of Jira Align, who have been investigating for a while and forming opinions about how do I do value stream management?” Baryshnikova said. “A lot of organizations that come to us say, I’ve heard about value stream management, how do I do it, and we send them to read books. But this solution gives you an immediate out-of-the-box [starting point], which you can evolve, because it’s very customizable to make it your own.”