How to manage the business of IT teams with Atlassian software

Digital transformation has brought many innovative ideas from different points of view, especially from business teams. Consequently, this has led information technology (IT) teams to adapt to them and not the other way around. It's a matter of finding balance within the different teams. In this post, we will go through the Atlassian offer to find that balance and succeed to manage the business of IT teams.

Usually, the ideas business teams try to implement usually affect most IT teams. Being at the center of companies and this transformation process, supporting and assisting the internal demand of each team of the organization on their way to implementation of new services or changes in software tools, has inevitably impacted them, making them adapt in one way or another.

As business stakeholders come up with new ideas, they generally just ask the IT team to double their capacity, often involving them too late in the process, thus avoiding opportunities for collaboration, since the IT team is only allowed to get up to date, without the possibility of providing improvements to the process in the conception of business ideas.

This influx of requests often results in unhealthy demand management, leaving the IT team delivering only half of the quality of the work and not correctly estimating the projects, by not being included in the early stages of the conception and development process. This situation puts them with an accumulation of work and increasing their technical debt. However, this same digital transformation process has created solutions to this significant problem, and the software solution Atlassian proposes for the business management of information technologies can do it.

What is Information Technology Business Management?

Information Technology Business Management (ITBM) is the discipline that focuses on offering value to companies: from workflows to IT software tools. The main objective of this discipline is creating value for customers through technology when addressing and aligning with business objectives, strategies, and needs.

What is the business management approach to information technology according to ITIL 4?

ITIL is an acronym for Information Technology Infrastructure Library and, within its practices, its approach to what ITBM preaches: "The organization must balance its need to:

•    Keep business operations up to date effectively and efficiently,
•    Transform those business operations to change, adapt, and be competitive in the market,
•    Continuously improve products and services."

As software development begins to play a more prominent role in all companies worldwide, and techniques such as Lean, Agile, and DevOps are spreading beyond the software world into different areas, IT project management is no stranger to this. These methods provide not only modern jargon, tools, and practices they also introduce crucial questions such as the following:

•    How does the Project Management Office (PMO) strike a balance between incoming business demand and the capacity of the IT team to meet it?
•    How do you tackle big, bold projects while allowing teams to execute them iteratively and incrementally?
•    How do software and IT projects fit into the broader context of business planning? Does the right equipment have a “seat at the table”?

Learn more about the DevOps solution Atlassian offers >>

Working with different companies, we have realized that today organizations are still applying traditional management models that no longer apply since IT organizations are reconsidering how to obtain, prioritize, and make their work flowing to other teams; as this happens, Atlassian tools are getting to known within organizations, with them, different ways of working and methodologies allowing other teams to communicate, collaborate, and better manage their work.

Which Atlassian software facilitates Information Technology Business Management?

1. Jira Service Management enables IT teams, to capture business requests; those could be from new technologies and improvements to reporting bugs. This can be done through different formats and attractive dashboards that allow you to visualize how you're working and constantly finding ways of improvement by identifying bottlenecks.
   
   Atlassian was named as the only Visionary in the 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for ITSM Tools >>
   
   
2. IT and software development teams use Jira Software to manage work tasks on Kanban boards. In contrast, business teams use Trello cards or Atlassian Marketplace apps such as Projectrak to communicate project status to stakeholders.
   
   
3. Last but not least, the Atlassian Team Playbook, which offers Agile and DevOps-inspired practices to help IT teams gain a "seat at the table" from the genesis of business ideas.

We already have an idea of the theoretical framework on how to implement business management of IT services, and also what software resources we can rely on to achieve it, but concretely, the doubt that may arise is:

What practices are recommended when implementing Business Management of IT Services?

1. Adoption of standard agile practices to open the collaboration between IT and business teams: the secret relies on IT teams delivering projects quickly and efficiently based on requirements well delivered and served. Therefore it is proposed to establish documents to register problems, challenges, and solutions, plan capacity and work and carry out retrospectives after each project.
   
   
2. Queues and automation are essential when prioritizing strategic business petitions: The IT team backlog can fill up quickly due to high demand, which slows down work. With Jira Service Management, it's possible to represent the flow of requests that best suits the needs of each queue and differentiate them. And based on the information sent by the business team, it's possible to automate the calculation of business risk and prioritize the required strategic requests.
   
                                                Scroll down for more automation actions
                                                                                    
   
   
3. Adoption of agile project management to accelerate project delivery: Agile changed the traditional Waterfall Management, and a study by Deloitte corroborates it after 56% of CIOs have expressed their intention to move to Agile methodologies. So why not thinking about acquiring a software tool that facilitates this transformation process?
   This change promises to increase the responsiveness of IT teams and also promotes innovation. We have observed this evolution for ourselves every time we help a company on its first steps with Jira.
   
   
4. Encouraging collaboration and communication with project stakeholders: Trello is an ideal visual communication tool that allows aligning the communications between the IT and business team, moving cards, and informing about the stages of the process by defining the scope, designing it, and creating new commercial services.
   
   
5. Taking better control of your ITSM projects: communication, follow-up, standardization of information, and monitoring of work performance can be achieved with different options from the Atlassian Marketplace.
   
   For this case, one is enough: Projectrak, which maintains stakeholders informed about Jira projects in their email inbox. Or through different views, getting an instant overview of project progress, getting in-depth information with just a few clicks. It's also possible to export project information and charts to PDF and Excel. Watch the video below if you want to learn more about:

It’s all about changing the Information Technology team how-to, adopting methodologies and strategies leading teams to collaborate and communicate more efficiently, using software tools such as Jira Service Management, Trello, and apps such as Projectrak, which combined adequately, represents a powerful solution to adopt and achieve an optimal IT Business Management.

Implementing effective IT Service Management

You already have the clues to implement effective Information Technology Business Management within your company, which is basically through a proper alignment of the different teams.

The decision is yours; if you want to take the leap and start working with Jira Service Management or another solution that Atlassian offers, don't hesitate to contact us if you need further assistance at any steps of the way. We are here to help and solve your doubts regarding the Atlassian universe.