Inspiration
Is the current pandemic of COVID-19 a game-changer? Well, take a look into various industries and branches: home offices are widely established, remote teams are working successfully together, even in most business departments and very traditional companies like banking and finance. But without IT, all that would be impossible. Stepwise, IT becomes part of the business and even drives business rather than just a cost factor: business-IT-alignment has already started!
Due to current situations, your business has to (re-)act faster than ever as, for example, resources are limited, and future deliveries are uncertain depending on container ships. Plans might become obsolete. The classic approach of "plan - do - run" is often not flexible enough. Agile methods succeed in most of the departments using Kanban or Scrum derivatives. So, many agile projects exist in your daily business, and most of them use Atlassian Jira for processing.
But how do all the projects in different departments of your business fit together?
Do you have a suitable overview of all projects you are responsible for reacting fast to changing circumstances?
How do you delegate new aspects and trends into the teams like overall sustainability requirements, which might become critical for your business tomorrow?
To achieve more synergy effects and increase communications between all involved parties of your business and IT horizontally and especially vertically within your organization, you have to scale your projects from the team level over optional, intermediate levels on the enterprise level.
Some companies try to scale their projects using, for example, SAFe but additionally establish many new roles like "release train engineers" (RTE). Other more or less extensive agile processes like LESS exist as well. However, as all of these approaches do not fit all your business purposes, their underlying process models must be adapted to the company's needs.
A more pragmatic approach is to use your current company-internal experiences and build hierarchy levels of interest based on your business. On each level, representing a particular abstraction grade of your business: you have projects you all control the same way based on epics and initiatives, actions, tasks, stories, or however you call those activities. For that, you are using the well-known standard features and reporting of Atlassian Jira. The bad news is that such multi-project dependencies are not supported out-of-the-box nor automatic aggregations from lower levels to higher ones. The good news: these missing features are available right now using "agile@scale".