DEVOPSdigest

Atlassian unveiled new innovations to connect the work happening across all parts of an organization and enable all teams to unleash their full potential.

The major announcements include Point A, an Atlassian program to create new products in collaboration with customers; and Jira Work Management, a new product that brings the power of Jira to non-technical teams.

Mike Cannon-Brookes, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Atlassian, says, “This is one of our biggest set of product announcements in the history of Atlassian. Point A is a game-changer for us. It means we can deliver world-class innovation at a fast pace with our customers, on cloud.” We are building products to truly empower the modern enterprise. Our expansion into business teams with Jira Work Management means every team across an organization can now unlock the power of Jira.”

Point A is a new program that brings customers into close collaboration with Atlassian product development teams, to build products that will power the future of teamwork. Point A leverages Atlassian’s investment in its cloud platform to deliver cross-product capabilities – such as unified search and common user interfaces – and speeds up the process of new product development.

From an alpha release to general availability, each Point A product evolves with customer feedback, so that the end result meets the needs of customers by solving their most pressing work challenges. By internally fast-tracking the most promising ideas and vetting early versions with users, customers get value out from Atlassian’s Point A products from day one.

Here are the five new products from the Point A program:

- Jira Work Management enables business teams to move work forward by being the one place where they track, coordinate, and manage their work with structure and consistency. With new functionality built for the unique needs of non-technical users, Jira Work Management enables teams such as marketing, HR, finance, and design to manage their projects and connect with their technical counterparts. With Jira as the backbone, work flows seamlessly across the organization. Jira Work Management is generally available.

- Jira Product Discovery is the new product management tool for agile teams. It helps product managers build what matters by serving as the place to capture insights and opportunities, prioritize impact, and engage teams around product plans – from discovery through delivery. Jira Product Discovery is available as an early access alpha release.

- Team Central serves as an organization’s connective tissue, helping teams connect and communicate progress as frequently and frictionlessly as modern work demands. It enables teams to create an organized home where they can track goals and share status updates. Team Central also provides a methodology that fosters a culture of openness, which enables teams to make more rapid progress against their goals. Team Central is available as a beta release.

- Compass gives software development teams a bird’s eye view of the digital services across their organization, connecting engineering output with the teams that support it in a single, trusted place. Through Compass, development teams can manage the sprawl resulting from distributed architectures, improve their processes, and adopt better ways of working together. Compass will be available as an early access alpha release.

- Halp, a recently acquired product, is a modern ticketing help desk that seamlessly integrates with Slack and Microsoft teams, making request management conversational and delightful for everyone throughout an organization. It fits naturally with faster, more informal styles of managing internal requests, adding just the right amount of process to keep teams in sync and work flowing. Halp is generally available.

As companies sprint toward digital transformation, they’re recognizing that IT needs to collaborate effectively with every department in order for the organization to operate at high velocity. At the same time, business teams and technical teams are working more closely together than ever before. The agile practices that drive transformation among technical teams now flow through to business teams, highlighting the need to keep everyone in lock-step.

With Jira Software, Jira Service Management, and the introduction of Jira Work Management, Atlassian offers three Jira products that solve the needs of teams across the organization. This enables autonomy and transparency for individual teams, while at the same time powering tight alignment across projects and people in the organization with Jira as a backbone.

Additional important updates for Jira Software and Jira Service Management:

- Open DevOps is a development experience built on Jira that makes a diverse development toolchain feel like an all-in-one. Software development teams need the best tools and technology to do their jobs well, and for many teams that means using tools from different vendors that aren’t well connected. Rather than taking on the complexity of integrating their favorite tools, development teams should focus on shipping value to their customers. The new pre-configured Jira project called “Open DevOps” combines Atlassian products and leading partner offerings, such as GitHub and GitLab. The tools in Open DevOps are automatically connected and ready to help customers take their idea from backlog to operational code.

- On April 19, Atlassian further boosted Jira Service Management with the acquisition of ThinkTilt, maker of ProForma, a no-code/low code form builder for Jira with 700+ customers worldwide. ThinkTilt lets IT teams create dynamic cascading forms within Jira that help them quickly spin up great service experiences for any team, delivering value fast.

- Jira Service Management is introducing a number of new features, including an embedded knowledge base, powered by Confluence, more portal customization options, and the ability to democratize service management by delegating administration permissions. All of these updates are designed to help IT power service management across an enterprise and enable every team to operate at high velocity.