Team 24 Europe Delivers: Unveiling Exciting New Atlassian Updates!

Atlassian's newest event Team 24 Europe has been a very exciting time where the best minds and creators all come together to celebrate and reflect on the past 6 months since Team 24 US and allows a new European crowd to attend a more local event.

Personally, my most anticipated stories are the future that Atlassian is forming with their wonderful features and updates continuously, today I will be summarizing the most important announcements of Team 24 Europe!

A New Product! Atlassian Focus

This new strategic enterprise strategy and planning solution aims to help organizations align their goals, initiatives, and resources to achieve their strategic objectives. It provides a centralized platform for teams to create roadmaps, track progress, and measure outcomes.

For more details, you can read more on the official Atlassian announcement.

Atlassian focus aims to solve the following issues:

• Lack of Clarity: Leaders struggle to see if teams are making progress on the right things due to scattered information, disconnected tools, and work not linked to priorities.
• Limited Visibility: Existing strategy and planning solutions are rigid and difficult to customize, preventing a holistic view of progress.
• High Risk of Failure: 70% of digital investments may fail to deliver expected outcomes by 2025 due to a lack of strategic portfolio management (Gartner).

Atlassian Focus Features

• Complements Jira Align: Provides a centralized hub for leaders to map and track goals, work, teams, and funds, all aligned to strategic priorities.

• Focus Areas: Central hub to track progress on strategic priorities with quantitative and qualitative updates.
• Focus Area Maps: Provides a visual overview of progress across goals and initiatives, with drill-down capabilities for deeper analysis.
• Notifications & AI-powered Summaries: Delivers real-time updates and AI-driven insights to highlight critical areas needing attention.
• Enterprise OKR Tracking: Flexible approach for adopting and managing OKRs across departments or organization-wide, linking them to Focus Areas.
• Integration with Existing Tools: Seamlessly integrates with Jira and Jira Align to track work and plan delivery.
• Third-Party Integrations: Enables tracking work from various platforms and integrating financial data.

Future of Enterprise Strategy & Planning in Focus:

• Continued Development: Atlassian will continue to enhance Focus with features like:

• Integrations with 3rd party work management platforms
• Talent planning capabilities, with detailed team information
• Budget planning and tracking with financial data integration.

Overall, Focus aims to be the solution that eliminates the confusion and inefficiency associated with enterprise strategy and planning, enabling leaders to confidently navigate the complexities of their organization's strategic goals.

Major Product Updates: Rovo and Atlassian Guard Premium

Rovo is generally released!

Rovo is a powerful search, chat, and agent platform that empowers teams to find information, connect with colleagues, and get answers to their questions quickly and easily. With Rovo, users can search through a vast knowledge base, engage in real-time conversations, and access expert assistance.

Rovo was generally released this month and is off to a great start showing a lot of promise, I personally have been using it and I have researched and tested in Tea Time Tech already, please refer to that article here.

Unleash the Power of Rovo Agents: A Beginner's Guide

There will be many more articles to come regarding Rovo as it expands its integrations, agents and core functions and as I find more real case uses to write about.

Atlassian Guard Premium has been released!

Since Atlassian Guard was renamed from Atlassian Access, we have been eagerly waiitng for the full organisational security premium features teased at Team 24 USA. More information can be found in the official release article.

Atlassian has described these two plans very briefly and nicely as:

• Guard Standard for identity and access management
• Guard Premium for data classification, threat detection, and data loss prevention, plus everything in Standard.

Now we have additional features such as:

• Enforcing policies to protect sensitive information
• Detecting when confidential content is added
• Taking immediate steps to mitigate risk

Additional Updates to Existing Products

• Jira UI Customization: The new customizable UI for Jira will give users more control over their workspace, allowing them to tailor the interface to their specific needs and preferences. This update will improve efficiency and productivity by making it easier to find and access the information and tools they need.

Source: The *new* Jira is here - By Work Life

• Rename of "Issues": Atlassian is bidding farewell to "Issues" as the default name for work in Jira. This change is intended to make Jira more inclusive and user-friendly by avoiding negative connotations associated with the term "issues."

• Custom Project Templates: Custom Project Templates will allow teams to quickly create new projects with pre-configured workflows, automations, fields, permissions, and more. This will save time and effort, and ensure consistency across projects.

• Goals: Goals is a powerful tool that helps teams stay focused and aligned on their objectives. It allows teams to set goals, track progress, and celebrate achievements.
• Program Boards for Plans: Program Boards for Plans provide a visual overview of work across multiple teams and timeboxes. They help teams identify dependencies, manage risks, and ensure that projects are delivered on time and within budget.
• More pieces of flair: Wish Jira better reflected your team spirit? With new background colors, images, and card covers, now your team can truly make Jira feel like home.

The Future of Atlassian

AI refinement and improvement

There is a clear plan for AI in all future Atlassian products not just Rovo, there's a significant investment into improving the AI capabilities and features to make all our lives easier.

Atlassian Intelligence (AI) in Jira empowers teams to be their best. Here are a few new AI-powered features in Jira that will enable teams to work smarter.

Save time creating work items

With AI work creation, easily identify and create work in Jira right from a Confluence page. Just highlight the text and AI will suggest a task that you can create directly from the page. And soon, AI work creation will be even more powerful. You will be able to create single work items from Slack messages, or even use AI to scan an entire Confluence page for action items and bulk transform them into multiple work items.

Automatically create work items from Loom video

More of a visual communicator? With Loom AI workflows, you can easily turn any Loom recording into a work item in Jira. Simply record a Loom, click “create an issue,” and Loom AI will generate a detailed work item for your Jira project based on the video transcript. Now you can go from unstructured thought to structured work in seconds.

Break down work in a click

With Jira’s new work breakdown feature, AI helps you break down large projects into individual tasks automatically. Simply create a work item and AI will recommend relevant subtasks that you can approve in a click! Now you can spend less time breaking work down, and more time moving work forward.

Smaller Updates I'm Excited About

• Custom project templates (a highly requested feature) will enable organizations to create reusable project templates with pre-configured workflows, automations, fields, permissions, and more.

One thing I would love to add here is documented and supported API's for creating projects with templates as currently its a nightmare to create projects or spaces through API's

• Conditional formatting in the list: Create rules to conditionally format rows and cells to highlight what matters most to your team (e.g highlight in red all work that's due this quarter).

I really hope this will help developers or engineers construct automations with conditional formatting comments as its pretty difficult to view and test conditional formatting without wasting a lot of time with trial and error currently.

• Attachments hub: For teams like design, Jira now features an attachments hub to centralize and manage all images and attachments related to your project. No more switching between apps to find or share a specific file.

A common complaint in Jira is the fact that automation or API's can't easily store and add attachments to issues, I would love for this to not be so much of a problem as other software allow attachment uploads.

Conclusion

Overall, this is a smaller update to Atlassian's ever growing roster of products but still a huge impact on the future of Atlassian and a clear statement of where the companies priorities lie.

Rovo, Focus and Atlassian Guard Premium are all great improvements to the Atlassian ecosystem and I'm excited to follow their journey and continue to test and utlise these in my day to day work.

For me personally, I will be investigating more into Atlassian Goals in the next week as I feel like its always been swept under the rug and I don't see people using it. I'd like to test it further, extract the strong points and reveal its usefulness.

I am saddened to hear nothing about Atlassian Analytics as that is my favourite product and not too much emphasis on Jira Service Management but Atlassian is always moving fast and I'm sure we will see a lot more updates regarding these products in the background.

Excited for the next Team 24! I'm also hoping to attend one in person sometime in the future!

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