Focus/Talent without utilising Jira Align

[Kate]

Due to some great success stories coming through about other organisations, there's some rumblings in my organisation about the Strategy Collection. As such, I've been researching as much as I can in case 'the powers that be' want any informal opinions.

Our organisation have a very active Jira instance, but Jira Align does not fit with our delivery modes/approaches. Chats with some Atlassian representatives have mentioned that signing up for the Strategy Collection does not mean you have to use the Jira Align tool; we could just get the bundle and not use Align.

So I'm hoping that there might be some admins out there who have experience in an organisation that has Focus, but doesn't use Align; Had you encountered any problems? Data gaps? Did you find any functionality/insight losses or technical problems that would occur? If so, how painful are the work arounds for your admins/users?

Thanks in advance!

[James_Reid · Accepted solution]

Hey Kate,

We use Jira Align, Talent, and Focus, but they aren’t connected. Specifically, Focus and Jira Align have limited/no integration by choice by the way.

I don’t think Jira Align is necessary between Talent and Focus, as long as your Jira instances are well set up and you’re utilizing features like Atlassian Projects and goals from the platform experiences.

You should be able to align Funds to People, People to work, and work to goals quite seamlessly  

my advice would be consider how you want this flow to work, whats important to be visualised and how the customisable hierarchy in Focus is best represented for your organisation. 

our Data gaps are by design because we have opted to keep Goals (OKRs) in Jira Align and not use the goals feature on the platform ( yet...) 

IMHO the only thing JA is bringing to the table really now is robust risk and dependency management across programs and portfolios, there are other things too but i think most of it can be done on the platform with some customisation. 

[Kate]

Thank you so much for your thoughtful and comprehensive response. Very helpful!