What is the Atlassian Government Symposium?
The Atlassian Government Symposium is an event held annually that allows government teams to connect, share, and learn how to take Agile work concepts and integrate them into their practices. As a certified Atlassian training partner, Ascend Integrated presented two projects during the symposium that showcased the unique benefits of government teams adopting Atlassian-based Agile solutions.
Merging Security and Efficiency
James Hunt, the lead Atlassian Expert, and Jeff Weatherford, the lead DevSecOps engineer for Ascend Integrated, discussed deploying Atlassian as a shared service across Platform One for the Department of Defense.
The give and take between most secure programming and ease of use amongst government teams has been a difficult balance to strike for many.
The solution, in this case, was the creation of a common environment for the team to use, built on preapproved hardened containers. By working in an environment that is already approved as safe and configured for government team members to use, there is a reduction in required communication for work to be completed and an increase in the efficiency of workflow.
Finally, a marriage of security and functionally exists that allows for a reduction in the bureaucratic processes that dictates when work that needs to be done is able to be accomplished. The efficiency improvement of these processes can be tracked and scaled using Atlassian software.
Planning for Success with Advanced Roadmaps
Shaun Jones, Chief Operational Officer of Ascend Integrated gave a keynote speech on how using Jira Roadmaps can make government project managers more effective. “Urgency plays a role in achievement…it’s in the planning where we win or lose.” Jones said. The need for managers to create an environment that reduces blockages to their team’s productivity remains apparent.
Advanced Roadmaps is a Jira add-on which uses existing data to create long-term planning visualizations. Planning using Jira Roadmaps gives project managers the tools to see what is occurring at all levels of team activity. It adds functionality through the use of dependency chains which create an organizational hierarchy.
This is an ideal add-on for real-time planning to occur and it can be integrated for use with Confluence for contextual messaging. The beauty of roadmaps is the simplicity of use by allowing a full scope of an organizations work to be viewed in one single source location. This allows managers to view and share bottlenecks with team members or clients before they occur, ultimately minimizing or avoiding them.
By having a system that allows users at all levels to understand and interact with data that helps quantify the expectation of project completion, project managers and team members are able to communicate more effectively. The level of granularity related to objective completion, task completion, and project completion is a valuable guide in helping team members and project managers visualize where progress is being blocked. Transparency of work processes helps to reduce the dissonance in communication between team members.
Scaling processes are made most effective when communication is fluid and data is easily visualized. Utilizing Atlassian software can help bridge the gap between stunted project growth and streamlining the technical capacity of your team. Ascend Integrated can implement these processes through delivering sustainable IT solutions.