Tag
Dependency management
- Product
How to Keep PI Objectives Visible in Jira from Planning to Delivery
TL;DR
Too many agile teams set clear PI objectives during Program Increment (PI) planning, only to see them fade into the background as delivery begins. Based on our conversations with program managers, release train engineers, and product owners, this post explores why objectives drift, the hidden cost of losing visibility, and how keeping team PI objectives in Jira with Easy Agile Programs creates alignment from planning through delivery. You’ll learn how to link Jira issues to objectives, measure PI objectives effectively, and keep your Jira Program Board a living source of truth.
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Over the past few months, we’ve spoken with program managers, release train engineers, product owners, and developers about one deceptively simple question: what makes team objectives actually stick? These conversations gave us an unfiltered look at the common pitfalls, the quiet wins, and the practical fixes that make objectives matter beyond the PI planning room.
Why share this? Because too many teams start a Program Increment with clear, energising PI objectives (whether they’re team PI objectives or uncommitted objectives), only to watch them fade from view as the work begins. That loss of visibility has a cost: misaligned priorities, delayed risk detection, and value left on the table.
One Release Train Engineer summed it up perfectly: “The minute those slides are closed, you’re relying on memory. That’s when teams lose the thread.”
Without visible objectives in Jira, the tool teams use every day, the bigger picture starts to blur. Swim lanes drift, dependencies go unnoticed, and progress becomes something you “feel” rather than something you can see.
In this post, we’ll share what our conversations revealed about why PI objectives drift and how keeping them visible inside Jira transforms the way teams deliver. If you’ve ever finished a quarter wondering where the original goals went, this will help you keep them front and centre - from planning through to shipped value.
Why Agile Program Objectives Drift After PI Planning (and How Jira Can Fix It)
In our customer interviews, one message came through loud and clear: the hardest part isn’t setting PI objectives, it’s keeping them alive once delivery starts.
The first few sprints often run smoothly, but as one program manager described:
“About a month in, swim lanes have drifted, and people start making decisions in isolation. Not because they don’t care, but because they can’t see the bigger picture anymore.”
When PI planning objectives sit outside the system teams use every day, they fade into the background. Leaders end up relying on subjective progress reports in meetings rather than real-time data.
As one product owner admitted: “We used to go into steering committee meetings saying ‘we think we’re fine’ because we didn’t have the numbers in front of us.”
The problem is that drift rarely shows up in burndown charts until late, when there’s little time left to correct course. By embedding PI objectives directly into Jira Program Board, teams can spot slippage early enough to adjust priorities or resources, without cutting scope or burning weekends.
The Hidden Cost of Invisible Objectives
Invisibility comes with a price. What looks like a small misalignment in week three can compound into missed delivery dates, reduced trust, and expensive rework by the end of the Increment.
An engineering manager told us:
“The team had been working flat out, but half of it wasn’t on the most important thing. That’s not a work ethic problem, that’s a visibility problem.”
In contrast, organisations that keep agile program objectives in Jira updated throughout the PI report sharper decision-making and more predictable outcomes.
“If an objective was lagging, we could see it in week two, reallocate, and still hit the deadline,” said one customer.
That kind of agility isn’t luck - it’s the result of having a clear, real-time view of where each goal stands and being able to measure PI objectives effectively during delivery.
A North Star in the Jira Program Board
Easy Agile Programs adds an Objectives layer directly to the Jira Program Board. It’s a natural extension of the workspace, not an external dashboard that risks becoming outdated. Program Managers, Release Train Engineers, and Product Owners can create team-level goals in seconds, right alongside sprints and stories.
For customers, this changes the culture around objectives. “When objectives are in Jira, they’re part of the language of the team,” one program manager said. “They’re visible in the same space we do our actual work.”
Another told us:
“I can have a 30-second look before an exec call and know exactly which goals are healthy and which need attention.”
Three Practical Steps to Make PI Objectives Stick in Jira
1. Write team-level PI objectives in plain language
Avoid jargon and write goals anyone can repeat. “If the CFO can’t explain the objective back to you, it’s too complex,” said one lead. Keep it to two to four objectives per team to maintain focus.
2. Score by business value, not just effort
Scoring keeps priority calls grounded in facts, not opinions. “When a new request pops up, we can show how it ranks against existing priorities,” a product owner explained. Business value scoring in Jira makes trade-offs clear and supports SAFe objectives by aligning work to highest value outcomes.
3. Link every Jira issue to an objective
This creates a visible goal flag on the ticket, reinforcing context for developers. “When they see the flag, they instantly know why it matters,” one engineering lead told us. That simple link turns everyday work into visible progress toward shared outcomes, and supports better dependency management when objectives cross teams.
Turning Jira into a Real-Time PI Objectives Tracker
Progress tracking in Easy Agile Programs for Jira isn’t a quarterly exercise - it’s continuous. The Objectives View blends story points completed, dependency status, and value-to-effort ratios into a live dashboard.
One program manager shared how this shifted leadership updates:
“Before, steering committee was 20 minutes of figuring out if we were in trouble. Now we walk in, show the view, and talk about solutions instead.”
Teams use it in different ways:
- Daily stand-ups: filter by objective to surface blockers tied to business goals.
- Backlog refinement: see value scores alongside story points to guide trade-offs.
- Sprint reviews: replace ticket lists with progress bars that tell a value story.
- Retrospectives: compare delivered impact with forecast value to refine scoring.
Your turn: Turn Objectives into Outcomes Everyone Can See
Across our customer conversations, one theme stands out: when PI objectives are visible inside Jira, they stop being a one-time planning exercise and become a continuous guide for decision-making. Teams know where they stand, leaders know where to focus, and everyone can connect the work in progress to the outcomes that matter most.
Keeping objectives in Jira means you’re not managing from memory or chasing updates through multiple tools. You’re working from a single source of truth that’s already embedded in your team’s day-to-day. That visibility creates alignment without extra meetings, reduces the risk of drift, and allows you to respond to change without losing sight of your goals.
As one program manager put it:
“It’s not about adding another tool - it’s about putting the goals where the work lives. That’s what keeps us aligned from planning through delivery.”
If your PI planning goals keep slipping out of sight, it’s time to bring them into the place your teams already live and breathe. Easy Agile Programs turns Jira into a living, shared objectives hub - helping you plan to ship, and then prove it.
Ready to make your objectives as visible as your work? Start a free trial of Easy Agile Programs and turn your plans into measurable progress your whole organisation can see and celebrate.
Your next 30 minutes
- Install Easy Agile Programs from the Atlassian Marketplace – it’s free to evaluate.
- Import your upcoming Program Increment – story points, sprints and existing issues sync automatically.
- Draft three objectives and link a handful of issues. Watch the Board light up with goal flags.
- Share Objectives View with your leadership Slack channel. Collect applause – and funding.
In half an hour you’ll turn opaque plans into a living dashboard that guides every commit.
FAQ: Objectives in Jira and PI Planning
1. How do you link PI objectives to Jira issues?
In Easy Agile Programs, drag and drop any issue onto an objective to create a goal flag. This keeps context visible wherever work happens.
2. What’s the benefit of tracking business value of PI objectives in Jira?
Business value scoring in Jira lets you prioritise by impact, making trade-offs data-driven and transparent to all stakeholders.
3. How does adding PI objectives in Jira help during PI Planning?
Embedding team PI objectives in Jira means the goals you set during PI Planning stay visible and measurable throughout the Increment, reducing drift and late surprises.
4. How do you measure PI objectives effectively?
Use a combination of business value scores, progress tracking in the Jira Program Board, and dependency health to assess whether objectives are on track to deliver their intended outcomes.
- Daily stand-ups: filter by objective to surface blockers tied to business goals.
- Agile Best Practice
We Simplified Our OKRs - and Got Better Strategy, Alignment, and Execution
TL;DR
- Simplified OKRs to two levels for clarity and focus.
- Introduced monthly confidence scoring to catch issues early.
- Strengthened cross-team collaboration and ownership.
- Replaced rigid planning with flexible roadmaps.
- How Easy Agile Programs helps teams align daily work with strategic goals.
- FAQs to help you improve your own OKR process.
At Easy Agile, we’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how to structure, align, and apply Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) in a way that actually works.
When we first introduced OKRs, our goal was to bring more strategic clarity and better alignment. But as our company grew, so did the complexity. Teams found themselves trying to work through vague objectives, siloed collaboration, and a rigid process that made it hard to adapt quickly when things changed.
Over time, through reflection and continuous feedback, we realised that great OKRs don’t just need to be clear. They also need a process that’s flexible and practical enough to help teams focus and deliver in real time.
If your organisation is running into similar issues, our journey might help you find a better path to strategy alignment.
Why We Had to Rethink Our OKRs
Our original OKR setup had company, function, and team-level objectives. While this seemed like a thorough structure, it ended up creating more complexity than clarity.
Many teams told us they felt overwhelmed by how many objectives they had to manage. Often, these objectives didn’t feel clearly tied to the overall direction of the company, which made it hard to prioritise or stay motivated.
Collaboration between teams also suffered. Important dependencies weren’t always spotted early, which led to mid-quarter issues and a lot of reactive work. On top of that, our quarterly planning cycle was too rigid. It didn’t give us enough room to pause, learn from what was happening, or shift priorities when something changed.
One of the biggest challenges was the way we tracked progress. Without a shared approach to scoring, it was hard to tell how things were really going. Teams weren’t always sure whether they were on track or falling behind, and by the time we found out, it was often too late to course correct.
From our feedback sessions, we heard some consistent problems:
- OKRs became a checkbox activity. Teams felt like they had to create objectives every quarter, but didn’t see them as useful for real decision-making.
- High-level company OKRs felt too abstract. It wasn’t clear how day-to-day work connected to broader goals.
- Cross-team collaboration was difficult. Dependencies surfaced late, which made it harder to stay aligned and meet deadlines.
- The planning cadence was too inflexible. We weren’t creating space for reflection or change during the quarter.
- Scoring was inconsistent. With no shared method for reviewing progress, we often missed early signs that something wasn’t working.
All of this made it clear: we didn’t need to adjust our OKRs; we needed to completely rethink them.
Our New OKR System: Before and After
Rather than making small tweaks, we decided to completely redesign our OKR framework. We simplified it and built in more flexibility. We wanted fewer OKRs, better collaboration, and a stronger link between strategy and delivery.
Here’s a snapshot of what changed:
Core Principles Guiding Our New Framework
This wasn’t just a structural update. It was a mindset shift. We redefined the role OKRs should play in our company and focused on what our teams actually need to do their best work: alignment, focus, and the ability to learn and adapt.
Value Over Volume
We aim for fewer, more meaningful objectives. This helps teams stay focused on what really matters without feeling overwhelmed.
Strategic Alignment
Every objective now connects clearly to a company priority. This makes it easier for teams to see how their work contributes to broader goals.
Cross-Functional Collaboration
OKRs are designed to be shared across teams. We make sure that responsibilities and dependencies are visible and co-owned.
Learning and Adaptability
We use regular check-ins, not just end-of-quarter reviews, to reflect on what’s working, spot risks, and adjust as we go.
Scoring OKRs: A More Consistent Rhythm for Progress Tracking
To improve how we track progress, we introduced a unified 1–5 confidence scoring system across the company.
Every month, teams rate their confidence in each Key Result - not just whether it’s complete, but whether we’re on track to achieve the intended outcome by the end of the quarter.
Here’s how it works:
This shared model has helped create a common language for progress, better conversations in our check-ins about what’s really happening, and proactive course corrections.
Early Wins and What’s Next
We knew this shift would take time. But even in the early stages, we’re seeing positive changes across the business. These aren’t just surface-level changes; they’re shifts in how teams think about impact, alignment, and shared responsibility.
Here’s what has stood out so far:
- Stronger strategic clarity. Teams now see how their work links to broader goals. This clarity has unlocked better prioritisation and stronger engagement.
- Improved cross-functional planning. We’re catching dependencies earlier, which means fewer mid-quarter surprises and more consistent momentum across shared initiatives.
- More meaningful check-ins. Our monthly reviews are no longer just updates. They’re real opportunities to reflect, course-correct, and celebrate progress - especially when confidence scores trend upward.
Of course, we’re not done yet. The next iteration will focus on simplifying how dependencies are captured, giving teams better support in shaping roadmaps, and reinforcing consistent practices around scoring.
How Easy Agile Programs Can Help Teams Operationalise OKRs
Once we have a clearer OKR structure, we need the right tools to support it. Easy Agile Programs helps teams turn strategy into execution that keeps OKRs visible, flexible, and connected to delivery.
Visual Goal Alignment
Easy Agile Programs makes it easy to connect team roadmaps to strategic OKRs. This helps everyone understand how their work supports the big picture - without needing to cross-reference multiple tools.
Better Collaboration and Transparency
With the Dependency Report in Easy Agile Programs, teams can visualise how their work intersects with others’ across the organisation. This early visibility helps surface potential blockers and makes it easier to coordinate shared timelines before risks turn into issues.
Strategic Prioritisation
The Objectives Report gives teams a real-time view of which objectives are in play, who’s contributing, and how much progress has been made. It helps teams stay focused on outcomes, not just activity - making it easier to course correct or re-align when needed.
OKRs Are Only as Strong as the System Behind Them
We don’t believe in one-size-fits-all frameworks. What we’ve built is a system that works for our size, our rhythm, and our teams.
It’s not about having perfect OKRs. It’s about having the right environment around them - a rhythm of planning and reflection, a shared language of progress, and clear alignment between strategy and delivery.
And getting that environment right means using tools that could support the way we actually work.
Easy Agile Programs can help with that. It gives teams the structure and visibility to turn strategic goals into coordinated execution. It helps bring teams into the planning process earlier, surface risks sooner, and keep OKRs connected to real work throughout the quarter - not just at the start and end.
OKRs don’t live in documents. They live in decisions and in the day-to-day choices teams make about where to focus. Having a tool that keeps those choices visible, flexible, and aligned will make a real difference.
We’re still learning and refining. But this shift has already helped us work with more clarity, more collaboration, and more confidence in where we’re heading.
If you’re running into similar challenges with your OKRs, we’ve been there. We’d love to share more about what’s worked for us - and hear how others are building systems that turn goals into real progress.
FAQs: Implementing Effective OKRs
How does Easy Agile establish cross-functional OKRs?
The Leadership Team drafts initial cross-functional OKRs aligned to strategic priorities, actively incorporating detailed input from teams to ensure practicality and alignment.
Do teams maintain autonomy within this OKR framework?
Yes, teams have full autonomy in determining how they operationalise OKRs through their individual roadmaps, balancing clear strategic direction with operational flexibility.
How do teams understand their contributions to OKRs?
Easy Agile Programs explicitly highlights collaborating teams and relevant initiatives, providing clarity on responsibilities and proactively managing dependencies.
What does ownership of a cross-functional OKR entail?
Ownership involves strategic coordination, proactive communication, risk management, and progress tracking—not necessarily performing every task directly.
How are routine operational tasks managed?
Operational tasks (“Keep The Lights On” activities) are tracked separately within team roadmaps, ensuring clear strategic focus without operational disruption.
How does Easy Agile handle off-track OKRs?
Our simplified 1-5 scoring system proactively identifies risks, enabling teams to quickly intervene and make agile adjustments.
- Agile Best Practice
Why Collaboration Gets Harder as Teams Scale
Collaboration in large-scale organisations often reveals friction in places teams expect to run smoothly. As product and development functions scale, the number of moving parts increases. So does the risk of misalignment.
At Easy Agile, conversations with our customers frequently surface familiar challenges. While each organisation is unique, the core struggles of collaboration are shared. To protect the privacy of the teams we spoke to, we’ve anonymised all quotes. But every insight is real, direct from the people doing the work.
This post is for anyone navigating the complexity of scaled collaboration, whether you're leading a team or working within one. Sometimes the hardest part is seeing the problem clearly. These are the patterns teams are running into, the questions they’re wrestling with, and the cracks that emerge when planning, alignment, and communication break down. Understanding and acknowledging these issues is the first step toward solving them.
Here’s what teams are experiencing and the key questions they’re grappling with as they scale collaboration.
TL;DR – Common collaboration challenges in scale-ups and enterprises:
- Teams struggle with communication and alignment, especially when working across multiple teams or departments
- Managing cross-team dependencies is a significant challenge, often causing delays and requiring frequent coordination
- Capacity planning and skill allocation are difficult, particularly when teams have to balance project work with ongoing operational tasks
- Teams face challenges in breaking down work effectively and maintaining visibility of progress across different teams
- Frequent changes in priorities and scope creep disrupt team planning and execution
- There are difficulties in translating high-level strategy into actionable team priorities and objectives
- Teams struggle with effective retrospectives and continuous improvement processes
What breaks down in cross-team communication?
Communication challenges tend to intensify with scale. As soon as multiple teams are involved, misalignment becomes more likely. A Senior Product Manager from a global HR tech firm described a pattern many teams will recognise:
"One of the main themes I heard in conversations with leadership was the lack of process, transparency, visibility, and dependency tracking. It’s always been manual across teams. We’ve done a really good job, but there’s an opportunity to do better."
Another team member highlighted how this disconnect tends to grow over time:
"At the start of each quarter, our conversations are strategic and cross-functional, involving sales and strategy teams. But as we dive deeper into execution, communication shrinks down to daily engineering huddles, and essential alignment details often get lost."
The problem isn't a lack of communication, but rather a shift in its focus. When delivery takes centre stage, strategic context gets sidelined. When teams move into execution mode, that shift in communication cadence creates blind spots across departments, leading to confusion, duplicated work, or misaligned outputs.
Why is managing dependencies across teams so difficult?
Dependencies create friction when they aren’t visible or clearly owned. Coordination across teams can be derailed by unclear sequencing, late handovers, or competing timelines. An Agile Coach at a financial institution shared:
"We had to run bi-weekly cross-program dependency calls just to stay on top of what was blocking who. We just list dependencies manually, there isn’t any unified visibility. At the ART level, it’s a mix of RTEs, Scrum Masters, and team members trying to link things, but beyond that, it falls apart"
A delivery leader at a global credit bureau reinforced the limitations of existing tools:
"I’ve never successfully been able to really tackle dependency visualization and put a process around that. It's always been manual. When I'm speaking to an executive, that means something... But when I'm speaking to someone on an agile team, it changes as it rolls up...Without proper plugins, even a robust tool like Jira struggles to provide clear dependency visuals. Planning becomes complicated quickly, leaving teams stuck."
Dependency risk increases when shared work isn’t tracked or visualised in a way that’s accessible to all stakeholders. Teams need to see not just their own work, but how it connects with others. Teams need more than awareness - they need shared visibility, clarity on ownership, and consistent ways to plan around dependencies.
How do teams manage capacity when demands keep shifting?
Planning team capacity isn’t just about headcount, but also about competing demands. Teams are often asked to deliver roadmap initiatives while supporting legacy systems, resolving production issues, or addressing technical debt. A product leader from a cybersecurity company shared:
"We’re always trying to achieve a lot with limited resources, and it makes roadmapping really difficult. We’ve made progress in estimating the team's bandwidth more accurately by looking at what they actually delivered last quarter. But we still hit the same issue - too many topics, too little time."
Another team shared how they introduced tighter prioritisation controls using a third-party tool, but even rigid structures have their limits:
"We use XXX as a source of truth for prioritisation. We have around 80 different initiatives prioritised from 1 to 80 of importance... no meeting can be scheduled if the project is not approved in the tool."
This helped formalise approvals and reduce noise, but it also revealed a deeper issue. Even with a strict gating process, the volume of initiatives stayed high, and prioritisation alone couldn’t solve for limited capacity. Clearer structures don’t automatically reduce the demand on teams or ease delivery expectations. That tension persists unless strategic scope is also narrowed.
What makes work breakdown and visibility so hard to maintain?
Breaking down initiatives into independent, testable stories is not always straightforward, especially when scope is uncertain or spans months. A software engineer working across multiple teams explained:
"Breaking work down is hard - some teams still think in layers. They say, ‘This only delivers value when the whole thing’s done.’ On top of that, we often run big planning in a five-hour day or stretch it awkwardly over two days. Third parties and shared services don’t get folded into teams, which makes breakdown and clarity harder."
Large epics often outlive the context in which they were created. As scope evolves, teams may struggle to maintain clear acceptance criteria and shared understanding.
An Agile Coach reinforced how hard it is to keep sight of progress:
"We break each story into smaller pieces as much as possible where it's testable by itself so the testing team can test it... But if it’s a lengthy project, spanning more than two months, it’s easy to lose clarity and effectiveness...Consistently tracking actions across multiple sprints involves endless toggling. It's difficult to quickly understand what's truly improving and what’s still stuck."
As work grows more complex, clarity suffers. Without reliable visibility, work risks stalling or repeating unnecessarily. Teams need tools, systems, and shared language to ensure breakdowns don’t get lost in the shuffle and progress remains meaningful.
Why do changing priorities and scope creep derail plans?
Frequent priority changes and scope creep disrupt planning discipline. They often signal deeper issues: vague goals, shifting leadership expectations, or unclear ownership. One product leader summed it up:
"Priorities used to switch constantly - sometimes halfway through a project, we’d have 30% done and then get pulled into something else. That context-switching really hurts. It demoralises engineers who were already deep into a feature. We had to raise it in a full engineering and product retrospective just to get some stability."
Another shared the toll it takes on delivery teams:
"We often found ourselves mid-quarter pivoting to newly emerging business needs, without fully aligning on what gets dropped. That lack of clarity meant engineers felt whiplash, and team goals kept shifting."
Without stable anchors in the form of clear goals and boundaries, even well-planned work can unravel. Work, then, expands to fill the available sprint, regardless of long-term impact, which brings us to the next challenge.
What stops teams from aligning strategy to daily work?
Teams need clear goals. But clarity breaks down when strategic objectives are too broad or when every team interprets them differently. A senior product manager explained:
"Prioritisation is only as good as your strategy, and ours wasn’t clear. The business goal was just ‘grow revenue,’ but what does that mean? Acquisition? Retention? Everyone wrote their own product objectives. It became a bit of a free-for-all. When goals are vague, it’s hard to prioritise work that ladders up to anything concrete."
Another added:
"We all set objectives tied to broad company goals, but when those goals lack precision, our objectives become misaligned, making prioritisation difficult and often inconsistent."
Without alignment between leadership priorities and team-level execution, valuable work can feel directionless. Objectives become outputs rather than outcomes.
What holds back meaningful retrospectives?
Retrospectives are intended to surface learning. But without consistent follow-through, they risk becoming routine. One Agile Coach shared how to keep them practical:
"We’ve tried tools where you just send a link and everyone rates how hard it was to get something done. But too often, it ends up with one person speaking and everyone else just agreeing. We’re trying to avoid the loudest voice dominating the retro. It’s still a challenge to get real, reflective conversations."
Another shared the risk of retro fatigue:
"To track action items consistently isn't easy... I have to toggle down and look at each one, which can make things cumbersome when ensuring certain behaviours have stuck...Effective retrospectives should surface recurring issues, not just review the recent past. Discussing ongoing challenges helps teams proactively tackle problems and move forward."
The barrier is rarely the ceremony - it’s the follow-up. Teams need lightweight ways to track retro actions, validate changes, and revisit unresolved pain points.
Where to focus
Improving collaboration means addressing the systems and habits that hold teams back:
- Keep strategic conversations active, not just at quarterly planning.
- Visualise and track cross-team dependencies clearly.
- Protect capacity for both roadmap work and operational stability.
- Break work into testable, clearly defined pieces.
- Reinforce the connection between business goals and delivery priorities.
- Make retrospective actions visible and measurable.
The teams we speak to aren’t struggling because they lack process. They’re navigating complexity. The opportunity lies in simplifying where it matters and supporting teams with the clarity to make progress, together.
The first step is recognising these patterns and giving them language. When teams can see and name the problem, they’re already on the path to solving it.
How Easy Agile can help
Whether you're dealing with blurred dependencies, vague objectives or sprint volatility, Easy Agile offers three purpose-built solutions to help teams stay aligned:
- Easy Agile Programs brings structure and visibility to cross-team planning in Jira. Perfect for managing dependencies and long-range planning across multiple teams and projects.
- Easy Agile Roadmaps gives every team a simple, shared timeline view, so they can prioritise and sequence work with strategic context.
- Easy Agile TeamRhythm makes sprint planning, story mapping, and retrospectives more engaging and purposeful, turning agile ceremonies into actionable, team-owned progress.
- Workflow
How to use dependencies to improve the flow of work
Success for agile software teams revolves around collaboration, flexibility, and efficiency. Whether you're a coach or Release Train Engineer supporting multiple teams, or a scrum master or engineer aiming for improvement within your team, honing your dependency management skills will boost efficiency and productivity.
While dependencies often seem like hurdles, here's an insight: they can be a powerful strategic tool to enhance your agile team's performance. In this post, we'll explore how you can leverage dependencies to guide your team towards greater efficiency and success.
Agile Team Autonomy
At the heart of agile is the concept of autonomy and self-management. It's all about empowering teams to own the end-to-end delivery of their work with minimal dependencies. This means optimizing their workflow rather than relying on other teams to deliver value to users. When teams need to depend on others, the flow of work becomes less predictable.
In larger, more complex companies, dependencies are often unavoidable due to the sheer size and intricacy of systems. The real challenge is transforming these dependencies into opportunities for improvement rather than roadblocks. By improving the visibility of these dependencies, teams can better understand them, prioritize and sequence work effectively and manage delivery planning and execution more efficiently.
More than one-third of agile teams report that team silos and the delays that result are a problem
17th State of Agile Report, Digital.AI
Dependency visualization
Improving the visibility of dependencies starts with open communication and transparency. When team members are comfortable sharing their tasks and challenges, you create a culture of trust and collaboration. This transparency is critical for identifying dependencies early and managing them effectively.
Software that allows teams to map out dependencies clearly can be a great tool for improving the visibility of work, making it easier to track their status and plan accordingly. Regularly updating and reviewing the dependencies you've mapped keeps everyone on the same page and helps you anticipate potential bottlenecks before they occur.
Easy Agile TeamRhythm is a user-friendly app that integrates seamlessly with Jira to support team planning, which includes visualizing dependencies. You can display dependencies by type and risk, and see dependencies both within your team and with other teams.
Dependency Patterns
Once you're able to see dependencies clearly, you might recognize patterns forming. These dependency patterns can show where a team is relying too heavily or too dependent on another team to deliver work.
Consistent bottlenecks highlight opportunities for improvement, like a change in team composition. When you notice these patterns, it's essential to reassess and implement strategies to become more self-reliant, ensuring a smoother flow of work and improved delivery timelines.
Prioritizing and Sequencing Work
Once dependencies are identified and made visible, you can improve the flow of work by organizing tasks in a sequence that avoids work being delayed by other tasks. Not all tasks carry the same weight or urgency, and understanding the critical path—the sequence of tasks that determines the fastest time to deliver value—can help focus efforts where they are needed most.
Sequencing work thoughtfully ensures that dependent tasks are tackled in the right order, minimizing delays and rework. This strategic approach to task management not only enhances team efficiency but also supports a smoother workflow and avoids delivery being derailed at the last minute.
Better Collaboration
By identifying and visualizing dependencies, you spot bottlenecks early, re-prioritize tasks, and manage delivery plans effectively. More importantly, it empowers your team to take complete ownership of their tasks while constantly improving their workflows.
Remember, every dependency is a piece of a larger puzzle that holds the potential to boost your team's efficiency. By understanding and managing these dependencies proactively, you can ensure smoother workflows, fewer roadblocks, and a highly efficient agile team.
- Workflow
How to Simplify Your Workflow With Visual Task Management
How organized are your Jira boards? On the scale of “well-thought-user-stories-beautifully-prioritized-by-customer-value” to “the-digital-equivalent-of-a-90’s-era-laminate-desk-cluttered-by-sticky-notes-and-old-coffee-cups”, where do yours sit?
It might be time to find a tool to help you whip your Jira issues into shape. And the best way to keep things in shape is to visualize the work in one place.
Read on for tips and to see how Easy Agile TeamRhythm helps you prioritize work effectively.
Visual task management
Put simply, when you can see something clearly, it’s easier to understand and manage. Enter: visual task management.
Visual task management uses boards to display and track work, which can give you a view of complex project tasks that makes it easier to comprehend.
For those of us who work in Jira, well yes we can see our epics, stories and tasks on the screen, but it isn’t always clear how they relate to each other.
That’s where a tool like a User Story Map, such as the one in Easy Agile TeamRhythm, offers so much value.
Get to the benefits
Giving yourself the ability to visualize your work comes with a long list of benefits. When your whole team can see the work laid out before them, communication is easier and teamwork can improve.
1. Consistent communication
Local and remote teams can see the same view of work from any location. Epics across the backbone with linked issues lined up beneath. When work is added or changed, you still have a central source of truth that is shared by everyone, no matter where they’re located.
2. A time-saving tool
Sprint or version planning is quick and easy when team members have all the information they need in a single view. Planning is much easier when initiatives, epics, user stories and subtasks along with story points and goals, can all be seen in one place.
Easy Agile TeamRhythm provides this all-in-one view, along with the ability to create and estimate new issues on the story map, and sequence them with drag and drop. Easy.
3. Avoid unexpected roadblocks
Ever had a release derailed by an unexpected dependency? For a smooth and dependable release, you need visibility of issues that are dependent on others.
We’ve made it easy to visualize the dependencies between issues on the TeamRhythm User Story Map, so you can avoid unexpected delays and keep delivering value to your customers.
You can choose to see dependencies between issues that are on the same board (internal dependencies), and where one issue is on another board (external dependencies). This gives you a clear picture of how work should be prioritized so that you avoid roadblocks and manage delays before they become a problem.
Read more: Dependency lines on the TeamRhythm User Story Map >>
4. Productivity increases
Working life is better when you can see how your contribution makes a difference. When everyone in the team can see how their work is important, and ideas for how to do things better start to flow, that’s when you start smashing your goals.
We’ve designed Easy Agile TeamRhythm to help teams focus on continuous improvement. That is something for everyone to get excited about because the team leads with their ideas for how they can make their working life better. Turn those ideas into Jira issues in just a few clicks so you can put things into action in the very next sprint.
TeamRhythm helps you see what to do first
Laid out clearly in a User Story Map format, with the ability to overlay a map of dependency lines, TeamRhythm makes it really clear which issues need to be tackled first to make sure that you can keep delivering for your customers.
Everyone in the team has an instant view of their priorities. Communication is streamlined. Collaboration is simplified and productivity increases. Doesn’t that sound great?!
Watch a demo, learn about pricing, and try for yourself in our sandbox. Visit the Easy Agile TeamRhythm Features and Pricing page for more.
Easy Agile TeamRhythm